Japandroids Come of Age with “Near to the Wild Heart of Life”
In the middle of eating an early dinner last Friday night, Anti Records direct messaged me on Twitter. They said they could tell I was a fan of one of their upcoming, unannounced new signings and while they couldn’t tell me who it was specifically, they asked for my mailing address in order to send me a surprise gift. I initially thought it was spam, but it was from an official verified record label who had already put out music for Wilco, Tom Waits and others. I decided to comply.
Tuesday, Japandroids finally sent out their first tweet from their Twitter account that was started over four years ago.
At the 32-second mark of that video, a record label’s name appears. It’s Anti Records. Oh. My. Lord. They were going to send me the new Japandroids single and maybe even album in the mail?!?!
I wasn’t disappointed Wednesday when I opened a package with my name on it and found this inside:
The reverse side of the record featured signatures from Japandroids band members Brian King and David Prowse. The sleeve of the record indicated that this was number 14 out of 40 printings of this advance single. Anti Records thinks I’m one of the 40 biggest Japandroids fans in the world. They’re probably correct.
The song, which was released publicly yesterday, continues riding the wave of hype that came with their glorious 2012 album Celebration Rock, a record dear to my heart that I’ve written at-length about previously. “Near to the Wild Heart of Life” is the title and opening track of the new Japandroids album dropping on January 27. The origin of the name is from Irish writer James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce writes:
He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.
The idea of being at the hinge of growing up, yet having trouble leaving behind the things you know and love in a wild, erratic booze-filled lifestyle is something ever-present in Japandroids’ music. The fist-pumping chorus of “Younger Us” from the band might illustrate that best:
Give me that naked new skin rush
(Give me younger us)
Give me that you and me to the grave trust
(Give me younger us)
Give me my girls learning love, wild and free
(Give me younger us)
Give me my boys and I swimming through the streets
(Give me younger us)Give me that night you were already in bed
Said, “Fuck it,” got up to drink with me instead
Or even the first words of their last opening track, “The Night of Wine and Roses”:
Long lit up tonight and still drinking
Don’t we have anything to live for?
Well of course we do
But ‘till they come true
We’re drinking
It’ll be over four-and-a-half years that the duo finally release a follow up to Celebration Rock. A lot of time has passed. King and Prowse are older. The two have wandered through the wildness of frustration as youth turns to adulthood turns to the time when you can’t just go get drunk and go to rock shows four nights per week anymore. But that part of yourself never leaves you. You crawl back to it at your most vulnerable moments, wanting to stave off the fear of the unknown, yet wanting to run away and break free from the restraints of what you know and detest. It’s The Replacements mixed with Henry David Thoreau.
The building guitar riff and the bumping drum roll that kick off the single are those girlish and boyish voices swirling around that Joyce writes about. They’re the quintessential aspects of the nostalgia-loving, shoot-for-the-sky rock that Japandroids have become the figureheads for since Celebration Rock. It’s the type of rock ’n’ roll you grow up on, taking all of your parents’ old records and figuring out that they actually listened to “cool” music at times, your Springsteens and Stones and Zeppelins and Whos. It’s the music of the youth.
The narrator is left at a crossroads from those blissful, adolescent days though as the first verse trickles in:
The future’s under fire
The past is gaining ground
A continuous cold war between
My home and my hometown
The unpredicatability of the future is frightening, but as much as you’re resigned to moving on with your life, those things keeping you complacent are tying you down. The “my hometown” part has me thinking of an allusion to Bruce Springsteen’s own depressing ode to his hometown in his aptly-titled “My Hometown” or Drake constructing an album about his connection to his hometown of Toronto post-fame and after growing up with Views. (King and Prowse hail from Canada as well).
I was destined to die dreaming
When one day, my best friend
With passion and pure provocation
Summoned me and said,
“You can’t condemn your love
To linger here and die
Can’t leave your dreams to chance
Or to a spirit in the sky
May your heart always be ardent
Your conscience always clear
And succumb to the city and surrender, baby
I’ll be waiting here.”
This has transformed into the band’s own version of “Thunder Road” meets “American Girl”. The narrator’s friend had one little promise they were going to keep as they pull out to win from this town full of losers. Staying static is a death sentence, it’s a deathtrap, a suicide rap, if you will. They need to get out while they’re still young.
And it got me all fired up
To go far away
And make some music from the sound of my singing, baby
(Oh oh, oh oh)
So I left my home
And all I had
I used to be good but now I’m bad
The good little boy of the past is no more. This mundane town has swallowed him whole. It’s time to break on through and be the musician his dreams have him destined to be. All that’s left is a man with a bad desire, and likely a penchant for drinking and smoking if we know anything about Japandroids songs of the past, without a clear move to make when hitting a roadblock in life.
It’s where the cheerfulness of nostalgia turns to gloom, the thought that the best times have passed you by and there might not be quite too many ones awaiting you. It’s terrifying, but so is staying trapped in a place knowing you’ll never reach your ultimate goals and be the person you want to be, not necessarily the person others want you to be.
It was last call at my local
And I stalled saying goodbye
So the girl behind the bar came over
And she took me aside
She kissed me like a chorus, said,
“Give ’em hell for us
The last drink of the night, last night in town
Baby, this one is on the house.”
Here comes the booze-fueled night you can expect from Japandroids. The terror of the future could take many forms here: whether or not to make a move on “the girl” or risk failure, whether to order one more drink and wallow in your pity alone at the bar or take your sorry ass home and wait for your aching hangover to set in, whether to keep spending every weekend in the dive bar around the corner with the same people or explore the unlimited possiblities and relationships that await in your uncharted world.
Growing up and reaching your mid-20s is one of the most frightening experiences imaginable, but so is staying the person you’ve been your whole life and never reaching your potential, so you just hold onto the wailing guitars and throwback choruses of a band like Japandroids and a single like this to guide you, to let you know it’s okay that you’re not okay with where you are at the moment. You can slug beers with your pals and sing about the glory days, that’s all in good fun, but don’t let it come at the expense of what you’re meant to do. “The future’s under fire,” so you better pack a fire extinguisher for your journey on towards it.
