For a while, “Winnebago - Charlie Hickey Version” was my favorite song. Now, if you get about ten seconds into this bad boy, you’ll come to the conclusion that I must have been terribly depressed to consider this a favorite, something that I wanted to hear constantly. Dear reader, you’d be correct!
Dark times aside, this song is perfect. The original is also exceptional in its own way, but this cover is burned in my brain as a god tier sad song. In fact, it’s the very first track on my master list of sad songs, an all-purpose collection for when you need to induce a good cry. My favorite line goes:
I wanna be your poetry
I'm sick and tired of bluffing
The way the vocal line swells around these words is so tender, the definitive climax of the song. Where in the original it’s almost starkly powerful, marked by a shift in the tone of Samia’s voice, Charlie Hickey’s performance is straight ahead, as if he hasn’t got it in him to do anything more than get the words out. I find this vocal consistency, characteristic of José González and Elliott Smith, to be even more effective than really demonstratively sad performances. There is a stillness, a fragility, inherent to these songs that is disarming.
Charlie Hickey is a master of this technique, proven with Count the Stairs (2021), his EP from last year. His more recent work has shifted into more rock-oriented production, helmed by Phoebe Bridgers’ drummer and co-writer Marshall Vore. They worked together for three years on eleven songs that were just released as Nervous at Night (2022), Charlie Hickey’s debut album. I got to review it for The Line of Best Fit—it’s slowly revealing all its layers to me still, and I’ve been listening to it in preparation for this piece since March. I won’t repeat myself here, but I’ll say that this consistent novelty, the constant excavation of new details with repeated listens, is the mark of a great album to me.
I recently saw Big Thief—twice—at the Fox Theater. The first night was the best show that I’ve seen this year, out of somewhere around thirty. Big Thief is perhaps the second tightest band I’ve ever seen, Punch Brothers being undeniably the first. They play spread out across the stage, sitting and standing intermittently, Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek on either end turned in slightly to face one another. Fans have complained that Adrianne doesn’t give much of a performance, but I completely disagree; she doesn’t play for the audience necessarily, but the lack of pandering is refreshing. She’s entirely immersed in the experience of playing, from her body language to her middle-distance stare. The other members have one eye on her at all times, and the almost imperceptible changes in her posture or volume triggering surges in the music. I found them to be enchanting, like watching someone paint or draw.
They played two full band versions of Adrianne’s solo work from her album songs (2020). For me, this album is deeply rooted in the surreality of the deep pandemic, long early morning bike rides in the hills with no destination. Hearing “not a lot, just forever” and “ingydar” played live, especially in a more robust and intense way, ushered the record into this new chapter of my life. I hadn’t quite known how to listen to this album now that I’m not terribly sad all the time, but I missed it dearly. This show dissolved those psychological barriers.
The full band arrangements of these songs were remarkable, totally reimagined. I almost preferred the more sturdier versions, especially of “not a lot, just forever.” I can’t find a full version online of that one, but this clip of “ingydar” speaks to the same point:
I mentioned Elliott Smith earlier, the patron saint of sad. The last song on this playlist is an alternate live version of “Angeles,” the first Elliott Smith song I ever heard. I wasn’t even a teenager yet, and I didn’t know anything about Elliott Smith, but I could feel on a deeply human level that this song was like a butterfly wing pinned under lights, a perfect specimen of delicate pain. I’ve loved it through every stage of my life, and I’m always finding something new to appreciate in it.
I’ve been thinking recently about a question someone asked me: if you could bring anyone back from the dead to play one show you could see, who would it be? I thought about Jeff Buckley, Amy Winehouse, Prince, John Lennon; there are so many people that I never got to see that I wish desperately I had. I think Elliott Smith would be the most transformative, moving single show I could attend; I can picture myself standing totally still the whole night, trying not to displace any of the air in the room. “Angeles” is one of the best songs ever written:
I can make you satisfied in everything you do
All your secret wishes could right now be coming true
And be forever with my poison arms around you
An be forever with my poison arms around you. Very nice, if you know what I mean :)