As grim as the new album’s cover and song titles appear, several of the songs sound celebratory—especially the ones about being alone, or at least unattached. “I Am Goodbye” is a country jamboree about how he likes to disappear; “You Don’t Love Me” isn’t mopey but a thank-you note for rockin’ him all night. “Beware Your Only Friend” is actually funny, because he croons, “I want to be your only friend,” then a chorus calls out, “Is that scary?”—as if you might be safer alone.
It never becomes misanthropic though. In “I Don’t Belong to Anyone,” he’s satisfied with being alone but still laments, “For a moment I thought I had/ Someone wanting to call me ‘dad.’” (I like to imagine this song is about a cowboy who has lost visitation rights.) He’s pretty affectionate toward the sexi mami in “You Don’t Love Me,” too. He likes people; he just doesn’t interact with them in conventional ways.
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Now. This is a lot different than his last album about being alone, Master and Everyone, which is whispered and pretty and has this hurt quality to it—but is actually hard and unsparing. On the first song he ekes out the words, “Love me the way I love you,” but he doesn’t mean it like that—he means, “Love me the way I love you, which is not at all.” It’s clever, calling on the tradition of please-love-me songs to make his point ironically, but if you stop to imagine a person who would want to communicate that message in that way, then it’s probably not someone you’d want to know, and definitely not someone you’d want your best friend to date.
He uses a similar tactic in the final song. If you pay only half-attention, the chorus sounds wistful or soft-hearted,
“It’s a hard life for a man with no wife
It’s a hard life God makes you live,
But without it—baby, don’t doubt it—
You don’t even have your tears to give”
but he interrupts the folk-song structure at the end:
“But I ain’t breathing, let me breathe
Let me go, let me leave…
Let me go, go where you don’t know.”
What’s the point? It’s a hard life for a man with no wife, but it’s not as hard as being married to you. UGGGGGGGGGGGGH, PRICK. PRICK.
Look. It’s one thing if you don’t want to be married anymore, but this cleverness, this irony, contains some brutality. One can be loving even in ending love, and he deliberately chooses to inflict hurt. My instinct says that if you love people (as a whole, as a concept), you would not take pleasure in delivering the body blows he lands here. But if the misanthropy charge is more than you can bite off, at least we can agree that he is hard here, a hard person as opposed a soft one.
It is age or experience that makes me like this album less every year. I used to be attracted to hard girls and was disappointed to learn that one of them was secretly warm-hearted. Now, though, the epoch of the hard girl is over, and I am no more attracted to art that celebrates cold-bloodedness than I am to the unexpressive girls who don’t know how to extend grace, unmerited favor, to anybody.
