Seems so out of context
Do you want to feel old?
Probably not, but it can't really be helped, can it?
In case you think it can: the Postal Service album Give Up came out ten years ago. Hence the tenth-anniversary reissue. Hence the tenth-anniversary tour.
At first, I resisted this. Not because of the passage of time, but the principle of the thing. That thing is: The Postal Service put out one record. It was unexpectedly successful, especially in the longterm, as it slow-burned its way to one million copies sold -- one of exactly three Sub Pop records to achieve platinum sales (the other two: Bleach and the Flight of the Conchords record). They never recorded a follow-up. They didn't really tour beyond the initial promotional tour for Give Up. Then, ten years later, they "reunited," re-released the album, and mounted an arena tour.
This isn't so much different than bands like the Pixies, who have reunited basically to (a.) satisfy the desires and demands of a much-larger audience that never got to see the band live when they were originally together and (b.) make the money they never got to make when they were originally together. That is all fair enough. But something felt mercenary to me in the Postal Service's insta-reunion (perhaps yoked to some deep-down denial that it had really been a decade since the album came out). If this is the precedent we set, bands don't need to continue to work and struggle and create; they need to create once, and then wait around hoping they can make some sweet reunion money later. Where was the Postal Service's actual career?
Obviously in this case, that career -- those careers -- happened elsewhere, as everyone in the Postal Service has other music projects, to the degree that it feels more like a supergroup now than it did in 2003. But still: I resisted this reunion blitz. I saw the Postal Service at Northsix in 2003. Why would I pay like five times that to see them do the same songs? (Lest you think I'm indulging in stereotypical hipster coolness, it wasn't because I liked the Postal Service before it was cool; I actually don't think I heard the album all the way through before going to see them, which I did more because it was the same weekend as the White Stripes, and Rob and Sara and my friend Megan were all down with going.) But: Marisa did not go with us in 2003. And neither did my sister, not least because she was (cue Michael Caine voice) fif. teen. years. old. So they wanted to go and Kasia and Jon wanted to come into town and go and who am I to tell anyone not to go see the Postal Service?
(Marisa will tell you: I am the anyone who passively-aggressively implies that it's kind of a ripoff to go see the Postal Service.)
So we got tickets to see the Postal Service at the Barclays Center, NIGHT TWO because they booked two nights at a 19,000-seat arena. And I grumbled about it a little bit. And then you know what happened? We saw the Postal Service, and it was really good!
I'm sure it helped that I knew all the songs this time. It also helped that we got GA tickets to Barclays, which is regimented but in a mostly good way, and also, thanks to a heads-up from my friend Hailey, we knew that if you just get there kind of early, there probably won't be enough people in the GA area to keep you from a pretty close spot (I offered our spare ticket to Hailey, who declined in part because the Postal Service reminded her too much of feeling awkward and sad in high school. Yeah. No reprieve from me feeling old there). And it helped, for me anyway, that in their absence the Postal Service has been reimagined as a band with Jenny Lewis in it.
She toured with them the first time -- in fact, I'm pretty sure it was the first time I ever saw her, and Megan (friend Megan, not sister Megan) and I both traced our crushes on her back to that night. Even then, to my recollection she was taking up some of the shared vocal duties she didn't actually perform on the album proper. But ten years later in an arena, the band feels less like a Ben Gibbard/Dntel collaboration than a wildly popular Gibbard/Lewis rock band with Dntel working the soundboard. And I mean that in a good way. J-Lew and B-Gib (Death Cab B-Gib, not Bee Gee B-Gib) switch up instruments -- drums, different types of guitars, keyboards -- and Gibbard still drives the vocals, but Jenny steps up with the California rock star moves she's perfected in Rilo Kiley and on her own. My God but do I hope she doesn't turn into Stevie Nicks, either accidentally on purpose.
Also, I felt additional trepidation about paying for what I pictured as a 50-minute set, possibly involving playing Give Up in sequence with a Phil Collins cover at the end. But lo! They made a real setlist (albeit a setlist that was apparently identitical night to night). And it was good, and nearly 80 minutes:
The District Sleeps Alone Tonight
We Will Become Silhouettes
Sleeping In
Turn Around
Nothing Better
Recycled Air
Be Still My Heart
Clark Gable
Our Secret (Beat Happening cover)
This Place Is a Prison
There's Never Enough Time
A Tattered Line of String
Such Great Heights
Natural Anthem
---
(This Is) The Dream of Even and Chan
Brand New Colony
It was loud and had a cool light show and Gibbard's weird David Byrne running-man dancing and J-Lew's effortless charisma. It was... a really cool big arena rock show with some degree of simulated intimacy. Even the new songs sounded a bit more forceful and blended better than I would have expected from listening to the reissue where they appear as disc-two bonus tracks (apparently the results of aborted sessions for a Give Up sequel). I have said reissue because, you know what? I never bought the Postal Service album. My first NYC roommate burned me a copy. So I guess this anniversary celebration is sweeping some corners there.
Give Up actually seemed like the perfect record to pick up on vinyl (Marisa's mom got me a record player. I buy things on vinyl now. Sometimes. It adds a special layer of neurosis to the process of buying music. I tend to like consistency so if I have, say, thirty Bob Dylan albums on CD, I'm probably not going to suddenly switch over to vinyl when I scrape up a copy of Knocked Out Loaded... then again, my consistency goes out the window if you consider that I have Hard Rain as a download from when I got it on Amazon for someone else, as a gift. But even if I'm one album into a career, isn't it kind of weird or annoying on some level that I have the first Eleanor Friedberger album on CD and the second on vinyl? No, seriously, I'm asking, because I don't know. Really, the point is: I know I can buy the next Sleigh Bells album on vinyl. That will happen.) -- but it's also like thirty five dollars on vinyl, so screw that (ah ha! Reasoning emerges!). But when I paid ten bucks for the new CD and then some more money for concert tickets, I thought: OK so maybe I'm making back payments on all of the enjoyment I've derived from Give Up (particularly the first four songs from Give Up which I am most intimately familiar) (see? If anything, I am more poser than hipster. But come on, Give Up is frontloaded like a motherfucker, I don't care how much you love the "ba ba bas" on "We Will Become Silhouettes") over the past decade.
It would be a stretch to call this laying out of cash an investment, but it did wind up having decent return in terms of good feelings. Basically, everything about this show turned out better than I expected. I thought the opening band was going to be the Mates of State, which at once seemed deeply 2003-indie-rock-appropriate and exacerbated the feeling that I was paying premium ticket prices to re-experience the first few months of 2003 in a single evening (only without Rob!). But it turns out Mates of State handled Friday, while our Saturday band was Ra Ra Riot, who are contemporary! And who offhand I probably like more than Mates of State! The Postal Service reuniting also occasioned our first show attended with Kasia and Jon since the Dismemberment Plan reunited, which was probably the first one with Kasia since college. We were in a Postal Service zone of positivity, I guess.
But I'm still gonna roll my eyes when people pine for a Smiths reunion.
A footnote, or possibly a two-foot-note: Like I say above I last saw the Postal Service ten years ago, during my first spring in NYC. I also saw: Rainer Maria, Mates of State, and Palomar all together; the White Stripes with Loretta Lynn; and a slightly belated twentieth anniversary show from They Might Be Giants. Not all of those are on this LiveJournal because that's also when I started it: April 2003. Ten years ago.
I've been trying to figure out what, if anything, to do with it, since obviously I'm not getting much use out of it of late. I definitely think about posting here -- I think about doing my iTunes charts, my annual spring/summer album progress reports, my link-dump of movie reviews, and occasionally writing about movies that I don't get to write about other places. Oh, and sometimes a post about Nicki Minaj that I will probably Trip to Spain pretty hard (or just fold into one of those iTunes posts that I've started and stopped like six times in the past year). But among writing film reviews, working on fiction writing; screwing around on Twitter, writing emails to actual individual people (and/or groups of three to twenty-five), and updating LiveJournal, you can see what comes in last place quite consistently. But I do like having a place to collect my links and sometimes post setlists and such, and I should probably maintain a web presence that's more detailed than Twitter or Facebook and more controlled than clicking on my byline. I'm beginning to admit that maybe the solution to that desire/need is not a decade-old LiveJournal page.
But as long as bands like the Postal Service keep reuniting, I'm able to feel OK about putting off the figuring out of what the next thing might be.
Probably not, but it can't really be helped, can it?
In case you think it can: the Postal Service album Give Up came out ten years ago. Hence the tenth-anniversary reissue. Hence the tenth-anniversary tour.
At first, I resisted this. Not because of the passage of time, but the principle of the thing. That thing is: The Postal Service put out one record. It was unexpectedly successful, especially in the longterm, as it slow-burned its way to one million copies sold -- one of exactly three Sub Pop records to achieve platinum sales (the other two: Bleach and the Flight of the Conchords record). They never recorded a follow-up. They didn't really tour beyond the initial promotional tour for Give Up. Then, ten years later, they "reunited," re-released the album, and mounted an arena tour.
This isn't so much different than bands like the Pixies, who have reunited basically to (a.) satisfy the desires and demands of a much-larger audience that never got to see the band live when they were originally together and (b.) make the money they never got to make when they were originally together. That is all fair enough. But something felt mercenary to me in the Postal Service's insta-reunion (perhaps yoked to some deep-down denial that it had really been a decade since the album came out). If this is the precedent we set, bands don't need to continue to work and struggle and create; they need to create once, and then wait around hoping they can make some sweet reunion money later. Where was the Postal Service's actual career?
Obviously in this case, that career -- those careers -- happened elsewhere, as everyone in the Postal Service has other music projects, to the degree that it feels more like a supergroup now than it did in 2003. But still: I resisted this reunion blitz. I saw the Postal Service at Northsix in 2003. Why would I pay like five times that to see them do the same songs? (Lest you think I'm indulging in stereotypical hipster coolness, it wasn't because I liked the Postal Service before it was cool; I actually don't think I heard the album all the way through before going to see them, which I did more because it was the same weekend as the White Stripes, and Rob and Sara and my friend Megan were all down with going.) But: Marisa did not go with us in 2003. And neither did my sister, not least because she was (cue Michael Caine voice) fif. teen. years. old. So they wanted to go and Kasia and Jon wanted to come into town and go and who am I to tell anyone not to go see the Postal Service?
(Marisa will tell you: I am the anyone who passively-aggressively implies that it's kind of a ripoff to go see the Postal Service.)
So we got tickets to see the Postal Service at the Barclays Center, NIGHT TWO because they booked two nights at a 19,000-seat arena. And I grumbled about it a little bit. And then you know what happened? We saw the Postal Service, and it was really good!
I'm sure it helped that I knew all the songs this time. It also helped that we got GA tickets to Barclays, which is regimented but in a mostly good way, and also, thanks to a heads-up from my friend Hailey, we knew that if you just get there kind of early, there probably won't be enough people in the GA area to keep you from a pretty close spot (I offered our spare ticket to Hailey, who declined in part because the Postal Service reminded her too much of feeling awkward and sad in high school. Yeah. No reprieve from me feeling old there). And it helped, for me anyway, that in their absence the Postal Service has been reimagined as a band with Jenny Lewis in it.
She toured with them the first time -- in fact, I'm pretty sure it was the first time I ever saw her, and Megan (friend Megan, not sister Megan) and I both traced our crushes on her back to that night. Even then, to my recollection she was taking up some of the shared vocal duties she didn't actually perform on the album proper. But ten years later in an arena, the band feels less like a Ben Gibbard/Dntel collaboration than a wildly popular Gibbard/Lewis rock band with Dntel working the soundboard. And I mean that in a good way. J-Lew and B-Gib (Death Cab B-Gib, not Bee Gee B-Gib) switch up instruments -- drums, different types of guitars, keyboards -- and Gibbard still drives the vocals, but Jenny steps up with the California rock star moves she's perfected in Rilo Kiley and on her own. My God but do I hope she doesn't turn into Stevie Nicks, either accidentally on purpose.
Also, I felt additional trepidation about paying for what I pictured as a 50-minute set, possibly involving playing Give Up in sequence with a Phil Collins cover at the end. But lo! They made a real setlist (albeit a setlist that was apparently identitical night to night). And it was good, and nearly 80 minutes:
The District Sleeps Alone Tonight
We Will Become Silhouettes
Sleeping In
Turn Around
Nothing Better
Recycled Air
Be Still My Heart
Clark Gable
Our Secret (Beat Happening cover)
This Place Is a Prison
There's Never Enough Time
A Tattered Line of String
Such Great Heights
Natural Anthem
---
(This Is) The Dream of Even and Chan
Brand New Colony
It was loud and had a cool light show and Gibbard's weird David Byrne running-man dancing and J-Lew's effortless charisma. It was... a really cool big arena rock show with some degree of simulated intimacy. Even the new songs sounded a bit more forceful and blended better than I would have expected from listening to the reissue where they appear as disc-two bonus tracks (apparently the results of aborted sessions for a Give Up sequel). I have said reissue because, you know what? I never bought the Postal Service album. My first NYC roommate burned me a copy. So I guess this anniversary celebration is sweeping some corners there.
Give Up actually seemed like the perfect record to pick up on vinyl (Marisa's mom got me a record player. I buy things on vinyl now. Sometimes. It adds a special layer of neurosis to the process of buying music. I tend to like consistency so if I have, say, thirty Bob Dylan albums on CD, I'm probably not going to suddenly switch over to vinyl when I scrape up a copy of Knocked Out Loaded... then again, my consistency goes out the window if you consider that I have Hard Rain as a download from when I got it on Amazon for someone else, as a gift. But even if I'm one album into a career, isn't it kind of weird or annoying on some level that I have the first Eleanor Friedberger album on CD and the second on vinyl? No, seriously, I'm asking, because I don't know. Really, the point is: I know I can buy the next Sleigh Bells album on vinyl. That will happen.) -- but it's also like thirty five dollars on vinyl, so screw that (ah ha! Reasoning emerges!). But when I paid ten bucks for the new CD and then some more money for concert tickets, I thought: OK so maybe I'm making back payments on all of the enjoyment I've derived from Give Up (particularly the first four songs from Give Up which I am most intimately familiar) (see? If anything, I am more poser than hipster. But come on, Give Up is frontloaded like a motherfucker, I don't care how much you love the "ba ba bas" on "We Will Become Silhouettes") over the past decade.
It would be a stretch to call this laying out of cash an investment, but it did wind up having decent return in terms of good feelings. Basically, everything about this show turned out better than I expected. I thought the opening band was going to be the Mates of State, which at once seemed deeply 2003-indie-rock-appropriate and exacerbated the feeling that I was paying premium ticket prices to re-experience the first few months of 2003 in a single evening (only without Rob!). But it turns out Mates of State handled Friday, while our Saturday band was Ra Ra Riot, who are contemporary! And who offhand I probably like more than Mates of State! The Postal Service reuniting also occasioned our first show attended with Kasia and Jon since the Dismemberment Plan reunited, which was probably the first one with Kasia since college. We were in a Postal Service zone of positivity, I guess.
But I'm still gonna roll my eyes when people pine for a Smiths reunion.
A footnote, or possibly a two-foot-note: Like I say above I last saw the Postal Service ten years ago, during my first spring in NYC. I also saw: Rainer Maria, Mates of State, and Palomar all together; the White Stripes with Loretta Lynn; and a slightly belated twentieth anniversary show from They Might Be Giants. Not all of those are on this LiveJournal because that's also when I started it: April 2003. Ten years ago.
I've been trying to figure out what, if anything, to do with it, since obviously I'm not getting much use out of it of late. I definitely think about posting here -- I think about doing my iTunes charts, my annual spring/summer album progress reports, my link-dump of movie reviews, and occasionally writing about movies that I don't get to write about other places. Oh, and sometimes a post about Nicki Minaj that I will probably Trip to Spain pretty hard (or just fold into one of those iTunes posts that I've started and stopped like six times in the past year). But among writing film reviews, working on fiction writing; screwing around on Twitter, writing emails to actual individual people (and/or groups of three to twenty-five), and updating LiveJournal, you can see what comes in last place quite consistently. But I do like having a place to collect my links and sometimes post setlists and such, and I should probably maintain a web presence that's more detailed than Twitter or Facebook and more controlled than clicking on my byline. I'm beginning to admit that maybe the solution to that desire/need is not a decade-old LiveJournal page.
But as long as bands like the Postal Service keep reuniting, I'm able to feel OK about putting off the figuring out of what the next thing might be.