Rope

seriously though, Low becoming a good band instead of an OK one coincides with Sally getting on board, this bodes poorly

So I'm skipping around the great wilderness of the internet, meaning to get down to today's entry but really just kind of farting around, and a variety of links I can't remember I ran into this thread about Zak Sally's departure(s) from Low, and the above comment from the esteemed John Darnielle with regards to Sally's announcement in 2003 that he was out of it, thanks, before he came back to open for Radiohead.

And now Zak is gone again, and I know I haven't talked about him that much here but that's because he has fallen prey to the great peril all bassists must watch for: His lines are so crucial to the songs, so skeletal (in the sense of essential, structural, not spindly) that it can be easy to just sort of elide talking about them except in the cryptic sense of talking about how well the songs are constructed or the propulsion some of them have or even melodies sometimes and etc. and then you feel a bit silly.

And now today's entry verges on the truly serendipitous for as I read Mr. Darnielle's long-ago point and think yes, I think I agree on this, and I always liked Long Division better and possibly this is why? I am also listening to my pre-selected song for the day and am in fact nodding gently along mostly to the bassline, which is steady and deep and very satisfying and underpins the same-as-it-ever-was drums (and I wish I could hijack the entry to talk about how much I love Mimi's initial and mostly untutored approach to the entry, but that'll have to do for now) and the skeletal (in the other sense) guitar, which comes in first as a counterpart to that patient bass and by the ending instrumental section has gone through some watery Durutti Column-meets-Neil Young phases (a phrase which finally, I think, pins down how I think of Alan's early tentative efforts towards axe heroism) before sort of counting the track out of existence - and I realise that not only was I unconsciously gravitating towards the bass in a Low song, reinforcing Darnielle's point, I am actually undercutting it (or at least my perception of it) because "Rope" is from I Could Live in Hope and thus this is John Nichols and thus maybe the huge jump from here to Long Division is not because of personnel changes and yet this does sound a lot like what I think of as "a Zak Sally bassline" and oh now I'm just being unfair to both bassists.

And then I go look at my salvaged song description page, written by Alan, and "Rope" has precisely the following written about it: all about the bass part john brought in. fun song to play in the bars ("you're gonna need more. . .") and hmmmm. I mean, you can't generalise how a band works or how songs get created and you especially can't from a first, rather tentative but really quite promising album to the rest of a now-lengthy career but is it coincidence that one of my favourite songs from said debut is anchored so firmly around the (sonically) implacable Nichols? And I think yes and yet no, for while musically it's the bass I'm really grooving too (and a good Low song with bass causes me to groove along in a way that, no really, usually only something like good dub does) my other main source of... satisfaction, I guess? from "Rope" is definitely in Alan's delivery. I mean, this is one of the most crucially titled songs in Low's discography, for the lyrics consist entirely of

You're
You're
You're gonna need more

You're
You're gonna need more

You're
You're gonna need more
You're
You're gonna need more
You're gonna need more

Don't ask me to kick any chairs out from under ya

That fucking 'rope' at the end of almost all the lines is so implicit it's almost explicit, and in fact when I sat down to write this I could have sworn up and down that it actually emerged at some point, may have in fact vocalised said word while singing along. So Alan's already teasing us, in a way, and the darkly humourous tone I think I hear in his voice both during the main body and especially during that muttered codicil that gives their/his fantastic music label Chairkickers Union it's name, presumably (and adds this whole other layer to the name, as when I first heard it I thought a union of charkickers would be referring to righteous protest, an unwillingness to let things lie - to consider that it could mean instead or (crucially!) in addition to that those who enable some sort of suicide is the sort of thing academics call "immensely provocative" and yet for now I just want to leave that as a sort of pregnant pause for you all to consider if you want) - he seems both amused and repulsed that you'd ask him or consider asking him for such a thing.

And interestingly, since I am often concerned with track times and album structures and sequencing, "Rope" is followed only by the (again) very codicil like "Sunshine" on Low's debut, and with it's 6 minute runtime is clearly the 'real' ending to which "Sunshine" is merely the ironic or at least contrapuntal response. So the idea that Alan Sparhawk might be a bit (in his own words) "mentally unstable" or at least have a fairly dark and yet black humourous disposition in his music despite his rep as a Mormon (because we all know what that means or do we I don't think we do?) is rooted allllll the way back in their debut and makes "Rope" interesting as well as good, although I know which one I'd pick if I had a choice. And I have no idea how we got here from bassists, but if my next couple entries don't have quite so many moments of weird synchronicity when they are being pondered which makes me go all stream of consciousness then honestly I won't mind a bit.