A Report on American Indie- Rock Music and the Concept of Love

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Sep 4, 2018 · 9 min read
Essay written by Cole, GoPeer tutor and Brown University Class of 2021. Pinegrove is a popular American Indie-Rock band based in Montclair, New Jersey. Listen to the their hit song and the subject of this essay here.

Liberation, Isolation, and Rebirth: Spoken and Unspoken Emotions in Pinegrove’s Aphasia

Over the course of modern American musical history, themes of love and romantic relationships have pervaded popular music. As one of society’s most popular art forms, music is a medium for artists to reflect on and express their romantic emotions as well as for wide audiences to access such sentiments and personalize them as their own. However, these themes have not been expressed in a consistent manner throughout the history of popular music. Early American popular genres like tin-pan-alley, rhythm and blues, and rockabilly usually discussed love and loss with a standardized discourse, presenting romance as a duality composed of good and bad, happy and sad, love and pain. In retrospect, this approach may have limited the development of early musicians’ artistic authenticity. Largely during the 60’s and 70’s, counterculture waves such as poetic, anti-establishment folk and experimental psychedelia challenged and ultimately expanded beyond this traditional status quo. Love can be one of the most complicated and intricate aspects of the human experience, something worth deeply exploring and something that we must be comfortable with perhaps never completely understanding.

Link to the lyrics here.

This report will discuss Aphasia, a track from New Jersey indie rock/americana band Pinegrove’s 2016 album Cardinal, that intimately delves into vocalist Evan Hall’s experience with love. As with a journal entry, Hall looks within himself and critically examines conflicting feelings about communication, loneliness, and attachment. Intense internal struggles manifest themselves in complex musical expression — over the course of four and a half minutes, as Aphasia takes listeners on a roller-coaster of energy that transitions from exasperated outbursts to whispered meditations in the matter of seconds. This process is guided by a band composed of melodic and slide electric guitars, electric bass, drums, and female background vocals. Ultimately, the dynamic course of instrumentation and vocals throughout Pinegrove’s Aphasia, which incorporates styles from folk, southern rock and americana, and even heavy metal, mirror the song’s intense and deeply conflicted lyrical reflections as vocalist Evan Hall considers communication in romance.

Aphasia does not follow the verse-chorus structure typical of traditional popular rock and roll music, instead flowing freely in accordance to its own unique structure. This choice invokes the unbound forms of early counterculture folk musicians like Bob Dylan, whose songwriting has been compared to the freeform poetry written by figures like Alan Ginsberg. Aphasia’s original structure proceeds as follows: 1) forty bars of lyrics generally sharing in musical construction build to an emphasized eight bar statement, 2) this occurs again, except with twenty-four bars building to another eight, 3) another twelve bars ensue, building to 4) a final anthemic section, which finally 5) transitions into a guitar solo during which the track fades out. This unique musical trajectory is a framework through which Aphasia can adequately express its dynamic sentiments.

The first section of this song optimistically introduces the central lyrical theme of communication in relationships over simplistic, melodic instrumentation. The song’s title, Aphasia, is immediately introduced in its second line. Aphasia is a neurological disease that can inhibit one’s ability to speak, form coherent sentences, and sometimes read. Hall uses this disease as a metaphor to discuss aspects of his love life, in which his experience with communication has been characterized by “silent nerves and hesitant oblivion.” In a spoken-word vocal style that he more or less maintains throughout the song, Hall describes liberation from this restrictive condition. Despite the intense thrill of finally untangling his thoughts and finding a voice, illustrated by sung verbs such as “letting them loose”, “crying”, and “unfurling”, Hall’s vocals are relaxed, contained, and minimally produced. For these forty bars, the instrumental accompaniment of melodic electric guitar and background slide guitar are also simplistically produced, relatively quiet in volume, and generally not dominant. These choices draw from folk influences, a genre whose inherent reflectiveness momentarily validates Hall’s voice as sophisticated and wise. After the fortieth bar, a heavier guitar bass line and drums begin, adding power and decisiveness to this section’s concluding thoughts of resolve, rebirth, and hope: “Stick around I’m thinkin’ things’ll be alright / Newly delivered won’t you live with me tonight?” This section places a dramatic lyrical breakthrough in the context of relaxed and confident musical choices, an approach that, as will shortly become clear, is built on false security.

The next twenty-four bars negate the sentiments introduced in the first section, using a full southern rock instrumentation to vent frustration about continued insecurities and build towards the song’s climactic moment of anguish. The second section of Aphasia essentially follows the same melodic structures as the first, but features a more complete instrumentation. Multiple guitars build off each other, meshing melodies with heavy bass lines, strumming, and slides. Electric bass and the drums thump in the background. This energetic atmosphere acts as a backdrop for a new central lyrical idea, “Just when I thought I had these patterns sorted out / Apparently my ventricles are full of doubt.” In this section, the pride and liberation Hall felt collapses and he is left with a sense of isolation that extends to crippling uncertainty. As the collective instrumentation pulses in and out in strength and pace, Hall’s words become louder, sharper, and more strained. The use of classic southern rock instrumentation, reminiscent of Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Allman Brothers Band, may not have direct ties to Hall’s negative feelings but in this circumstance represent a musical transition. They are a bridge from the the stripped down folk influences that framed the song’s early optimism to the painful climactic outburst that concludes the section.

The lines, “Nah things go wrong sometimes don’t let it freak you out / But if I don’t have you by me then I’ll go underground” represent a lyrical microcosm of Aphasia as a whole. They place nonchalant optimism side by side with a deeply personal outburst of pain and vulnerability. The first line features instrumentation that focuses heavily on the downbeats with a single guitar and drums, creating a choppy effect. This creates a sense of urgency not present in similar lyrical statements from earlier in the song, implying that the original calm confidence is being stripped away. This transition becomes evident when immediately following “freak you out”, the entire band joins in with loud and powerful chords, setting the scene for the crucial next line. When Hall belts, “If I don’t have you by me then I’ll go underground,” his voice breaks into an exasperated wail. The line, where he admits that his love is so consuming that he cannot live without it, invokes linguistic and musical influences from 80’s heavy metal. Just like metal pioneers like Black Sabbath and Van Halen, Hall confronts dark feelings of death and hopelessness via an outpour of uncontrolled noise and emotion. Heavy metal as a genre uses power, volume, and angry lyrics to strip away the restrictive superficialities of accepted societal norms and uncover truths underneath. By placing this moment of vulnerability in the raw and intimate context of metal, Aphasia provides a critical window into a man whose feelings are often questionable in their authenticity, or at least underdeveloped. This is the line where Hall confronts the harrowing realities of his own crude emotions, despite the painful knowledge that they undermine the post-aphasia satisfaction, confidence, cathartic “unfurling” that he had convinced himself existed.

Immediately after this cry, Aphasia decelerates into a detached, melancholy lyrical and musical tone, effectively the antithesis of the preceding line. The first word following “underground” is “Nah”, a cycle back to the earlier “Nah” from the hollow line “Nah things go wrong sometimes don’t let it freak you out.” Hall whispers this dismissive word over suddenly soft melodic guitar and gentle drums, effectively an attempt to wave away the gnawing realities of his psyche. The line continues into “Nah but what you got was in your reaches all along / Someday you’ll be reaching for me and I’ll be gone.” This idea of reaching is crucial to understanding how Hall experiences aphasia in love — in this context, one reaches out when they are in need, searching for reciprocation, something to hold onto. To layer on further complexity, female former band member Nandi Plunkett, who had thus far only provided minor background vocals, suddenly emerges in these lines as an equal vocal presence to Hall. This dynamic creates a discourse between Hall and a possible lover, a musical window into the communication issues around which this song revolves. Hall and Plunkett sing the same lyrics, and the narrative becomes obscured — it is no longer distinctly about Hall’s experience but rather about the complex, delicate network of said and unsaid emotions that course through a relationship. Each voice is reaching for the other, but this metaphorical ‘aphasia’ creates a vacuum in between, an impediment to synchrony.

Plunkett’s voice then disappears, and the lyrics refocus on Hall’s process of reconciling his feelings and moving forward. In the quietest and most sweetly sung line of the song, accompanied by virtually zero instrumentation, Hall admits that to remind himself of these feelings, he “wrote this little song.” The line confirms that Aphasia was written as a way for Hall to explore his own thoughts, a musical journal entry. The line’s use of the adjective “little” also, like many of Aphasia’s lyrics, attempts to redefine intense, confusing, and at times crippling emotions as casual and insignificant. This is a crucial part of Hall’s process of moving on, which at this point we can confidently interpret as the ultimate goal of his emotional self-confrontation. In fact, Hall and Plunkett’s voices each share hope for futures free of oppressive attachment, singing with an empowering crescendo, “One day I won’t need your love / One day I won’t define myself by the one I’m thinking of.”

This musical trajectory extends to a repeating uplifting anthem of, “And if one day I won’t need it / And if one day you won’t need it.” While these lines are similar to those which precede them, the insertion of ‘if’s’ are crucial because they embrace uncertainty while still looking forwards with some hopefulness. In this way, these final lines are essentially a middle path between the song’s polarized tones of expression. All members of the band strum powerfully during this conclusive loop, at a slower pace and quieter volume from the moment of heavy metal. Rather than pushing Hall to a breaking point, the full instrumentation acts as a supportive force, an extension of his own voice. For example, after singing these lyrics, Hall belts a “yeeeeeeeaaa” that gets lost in the instrumentation, almost indistinguishable from a drawn out note on the slide guitar. It is as if the vocals finally found harmony with and meshed into the background; after arriving at this point in his process of self-reflection there is nothing more Hall needs to say. Subsequently, a minute of looping guitar solo ensues, gradually fading out the track. One way to interpret the guitar solo is as an extension of Hall’s closure, a minute for him to take a breath after an exhausting roller-coaster of emotion. A second, more pessimistic way to consider it is as representing the cyclical endlessness of Hall’s romantic emotions, which despite a moment of clarity will forever fluctuate between hollow satisfaction and intense helplessness. The ambiguity of this conclusion reflects that Hall himself probably is uncertain where his relationship, and the headspace that it brings about in him, will go from here.

Aphasia by Pinegrove represents a departure from superficiality around romance prominent in early popular American music, which tended to box songs into restrictive lyrical narratives of either happiness and love or despair and heartbreak. On the other hand, drawing primarily from thematic and musical influences of 60’s and 70’s counterculture folk and rock, Aphasia dives into complexities and conflicting feelings surrounding love. Vocalist Evan Hall takes listeners on a journey into his fragile, erratic psyche, yielding a musical product whose dynamism is undeniably artistic. Designed as an outlet for Hall to understand his own emotions, Aphasia concludes with ambivalence, an unclear mixture of closure and continued uncertainty.

We use language as a crutch to simplify concepts beyond our capacity of comprehension. In romance, we often distill overwhelming feelings into simple terms like “love” and “heartbreak” to fabricate a sense of agency over our emotions. But the truth is, the human mind is beyond our control; it drives some to spontaneously quit their job and travel the world, and others to take their own lives. Aphasia is a tribute to those who pioneered a movement committed to using music not for palatable mass consumption, but as a space to evaluate the intricacies of this existential reality. The track acknowledges that, no matter how much human beings crave control — dominating each other, our environment, our habits and our lifestyles — we will never be able to truly conquer the ultimate mystery of existence: our minds.

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