Sweet talk never lasts: Wednesday's "Elderberry Wine"
A new song and a couple of other songs by a band that's been one of my faves for a while now.
I’m not sure, but I think Wednesday might be my favorite band right now. This is their new single, “Elderberry Wine,” which sounds like classic country crossed up with Rumors-era Fleetwood Mac, maybe like something you’d hear on the jukebox in the bar in the video. I love it. I can’t get the hook in the chorus out of my head.
Singer-songwriter Karly Hartzman writes intensely personal, deeply associative lyrics that don’t cohere into narratives—until suddenly, they do. The stories might come from crime novels, or they might just be observations from growing up on the margins of the American South (the band is from Asheville, NC). On first listen, she gets across on tone and delivery as much as she does on the words themselves. Her phrasing is emotive, distinct, unique.
But the words when you parse them are very good, and they’re worth your time. Take this quatrain from “Quarry,” which was my come-to-Jesus moment with this band a few years ago:
Georgie set fire to acres of cotton setting off model rockets
The kid from the Jewish family got the preacher’s kid pregnant
They sent her off and we never heard too much more about it
The sweet talk never lasts and you learn to go on without it
I feel like I could say so much about these lyrics, the juxtaposition of those first two lines, in which these events are given equal weight, as well as the adolescent perspective of the narrator. The last line identifies with the banished, pregnant preacher’s kid, presumably through shared experience or at least shared subject position. The song has a plainspoken quality, the odd juxtapositions and redundancies: “we never heard too much more about it.” And the life lesson in the last line is haunting. Without getting any of the details, we understand the narrator has internalized this through bitter, or perhaps just resigned experience: “sweet talk never lasts.”
“Quarry” is probably the most accessible song on their last record, Rat Saw God, which is uncompromising—it starts with one of the most abrasive, oddly structured tracks, which is only ninety-three seconds, then the second song, “Bull Believer,” is eight and a half minutes, with Hartzman screaming herself hoarse over a coda of dirge-like guitar noise.
The loud-quiet dynamics recall grunge, and the stoner indie country sound of guitarist M.J. Lenderman’s solo record recalls nineties bands like Dinosaur Jr. and Pavement, as well as (to my ear) Neil Young. Lenderman’s solo stuff is maybe more accessible, but some of Wednesday’s songs are positively anthemic. The band mixes up indie with country, building textures with Hartzman’s open-tuned (I think) guitars, Lenderman’s big, overdriven sound, and the pedal steel. The way they teeter between noise and melody also reminds me of nineties bands. At their most melodic and anthemic, they seem on the verge of breaking into ear-splitting noise, while at their noisiest and most abrasive, they tease the ear with snatches of melody.
I got to see Wednesday last year in Santa Fe, and they were terrific. I also appreciated their rapport and their connection with their fans. During one of the quieter songs, a woman in the audience was singing along enthusiastically and loudly. Later in the set, when the band played another quiet one, the woman started singing again. As if she were embarrassed, Hartzman said politely that while she appreciated the help, she wanted to sing this one herself.
On a record of covers, Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ‘em Up, they do one of Mike Cooley’s great Drive-by Truckers songs, “Women Without Whiskey.” Though for my money, the showstopper on that record and at Meow Wolf was their cover of Gary Stewart’s “She’s Acting Single (I’m Drinking Doubles).”
I don’t know how much the Truckers are an influence, but one of my favorite Wednesday songs, “Chosen to Deserve,” employs a similar narrative strategy to DBT’s “Let There Be Rock.” Both songs are drunk-a-logues, litanies filled with oddly specific yet universal and ultimately unremarkable American adolescent experiences. For Patterson Hood, it’s dropping acid at a Blue Öyster Cult concert, puking in the toilet and nearly drowning after breaking into a friend’s house. For Hartzman, it’s watering down the liquor and watching her friends take Benadryl till they hallucinate, and one of them nearly dies.
In themselves, these details might be puerile as storytelling, yet both songs turn in different ways. Hood’s recollections all lead to the revelation of seeing AC/DC with Bon Scott: rock and roll saved his life, Hood says when performing the song live. Hartzman’s lyrics are contained in a narrative frame: now that she’s been dating this guy for a while, instead of telling him her best stories, she’s telling him her worst ones. The song turns on the narrator’s revelation of the emptiness she feels. Rather than the lover she’s talking to being chosen to deserve her, which is the conceit of much of the song, in the end, she feels chosen to deserve him. So much of the song is about numbing oneself, yet in the end, the narrator needs intimacy. Given all that’s come before, there’s a quiet terror in that attachment.
I can’t remember the last time I felt this excited about a new band, of for that matter, the last time a band sounded new. Most of what I listen to is old or a throwback, anyway. I don’t necessarily need things to sound new. Part of what makes rock and roll great is the fact it almost always sounds like you might’ve heard it before: it’s new, but it’s familiar, too. But this feels new and familiar in ways that are exciting, and for all that the lyrics are sometimes intensely personal and associative, the songs are also grounded in the storytelling tradition I love. I don’t know whether this is a just a single, or the first single from a new record. Either way, I’m looking forward to more.