Lovedrug in Atlanta, July 2005. Photo by me.
Why do I like a band’s decade-old album better than their new one?
or
Why is a raw, 16-year-old EP better than a slick, refined LP released last month from the same musician?
or
Why do I like Kerith Ravine more than Lovedrug?
Why do I like 1999’s “The Mystery of December”: https://kerithravine.bandcamp.com/track/the-mystery-of-december
(the last minute and 20 seconds is especially killer)
Far more than 2015’s “Raygun”?
https://lovedrug.bandcamp.com/track/ray-gun-2
(Both songs were written, played and sung by Michael Shepard.)
(November 2023 update: I worked to restore missing songs that keep getting removed and/or moved. Shoot me a message if anything is missing.)
Any music fan can relate to these questions (well, maybe the first two). It happens all the time; we adore an older album from a band but don’t like their new stuff as much (and sometimes, we don’t like the newer stuff at all). Most of the time this is due to personal preference or life events surrounding the release of that older album that we love. It is not necessarily because the artist was any better 10–20 years ago; that is illogical because practice and age should lead to improvement over time for anyone in any craft.
To make this more specific, I theorize most music geeks (like me) prefer music from the year they graduated high school more than any other year in history. If I were to rank my favorite albums of all time (and I have), a large majority would be from the year 1995 (give or take a couple years). No matter how good the music is that is released this year or in the future, I will probably always prefer the music that was released in my teenage years (for me, the mid-90’s).
The reasons for this are many:
-We are more impressionable as teenagers.
-When you hear a song while you are holding someone’s hand for the first time the memory is stronger.
-The younger you are, the less music you have heard, and the bigger impact songs have; especially when these songs are styles of music that are new to you.
-When you discover a new band, no matter how much they might improve over the years, you will always prefer the first song or album you heard from them.
-“Neural Nostalgia” as explained in this excellent Slate essay.
These are generalizations, but for me prove true time and time again. To make all of this specific to a single artist, let’s take Lovedrug. I could find other examples in my music collection, but there are few — if any —in which the expanse between the older songs I love and the newer songs I don’t is as wide. And Lovedrug’s new album, Notions, spurred me on to finally write about these thoughts I have had about the band for years.
Lovedrug is the brainchild rock band of frontman Michael Shepard. Lovedrug released their first EP in 2002 after Shepard’s previous band, Kerith Ravine, dissolved after their final EP in 2001. The lone Kerith Ravine full-length, The Streams of Jettison, was released in 2000, and then Lovedrug’s debut full-length, Pretend You’re Alive, dropped in 2004. Besides Michael Shepard, only bass player Adam Ladd played in both bands, spanning 5–6 years.
I like most songs Michael Shepard has released with the both of his bands. Lyrically I enjoy his new songs as much as the old ones. He has a terrific imagination and writes with a lot of Biblical, folklore, and fairy-tale imagery; such as ghosts, angels, dragons, etc. Below are three lyrical examples across the 16 year period.
Many of Kerith Ravine’s lyrics are hard to understand and unpublished, so rather than attempt to transcribe them, here is a clip of the liner notes from their debut 1999 EP:
Beyond the woods into an evaporated sun is where I was born, accurately drawn from coal and other such pleasures and then uncontrollably slowed down, hovering over empty towns where so many useless faces lie. I knew I had to tread on before my shadows burned me. It was then that I realized how aged I was becoming, and between all the unfortunately dull faces, I meant nothing.
From 2004’s “Angels with Enemies”:
Because all night I’ve been picking fights
With the fur men and the bar stool kings
And when it sounds right, I’ll bring them down to their knees, son
And with the glorious red, we’ll be off with their heads
Phantoms in the courtyard waiting on the breeze to float after me
To a chamber of wailing ferns
The calm yellow air and the dark woolen skies say our villains will arise
Oh, haunted by two’s, they wake by you
From 2015’s “Anthology”:
Sucking on a full moon, come on arise!
If he is a beast then give him the night
No one can defeat what they can’t understand
I would love to know it like the back of my hand
Drinking up the sun will you call out the lies
Can you bottle feed it up inside
Shake out all the stars and fill it with sand
I’ll catch them but I don’t even understand, oh understand
Despite lyrical consistency, musically things have changed dramatically. Kerith Ravine and the current Lovedrug couldn’t be any more different. Here is the one and only Kerith Ravine concert video that is available online:
And here is one of the more recent Lovedrug concert films I could find:
That paints a fairly large contrast between the two bands and eras (the first I like and the second I don’t), but as Lovedrug began, the line was far more blurred. In 2014, Lovedrug released a 20-track Pretend You’re Alive 10th Anniversary edition, which contained demos and live versions of both songs that appeared on the original album along with b-sides.
For the longest time I was hesitant to pay twelve dollars for a bunch of rough tracks that I had heard in different forms already, but as I began writing this a couple weeks ago, I took the plunge and made the purchase. I am glad I did because the 20 rare tracks are a great documentation of the shift from one band to the next. The Lovedrug song “The Narcoleptic” could have easily appeared on the final Kerith Ravine EP. The version of this song on 2014 rarities album is awesome, and my favorite of the rarities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D773vU4O8O4
In September Lovedrug released their 5th full-length album, Notions. It is a fine album with good songwriting and production, but it unfortunately does not grab me in any way. Michael Shepard has now been refining his craft and releasing music for 16 years. However, I greatly prefer the lo-fi, 1999 debut EP from Kerith Ravine, The Drafting Sessions. Why?
To figure this out, I’ll continue to discuss much of Shepard’s output in the 15 years between. There are 2 EPs and 1 LP from Kerith Ravine 1998–2001; 5 LPs and nearly a dozen EPs from Lovedrug 2002-present, and then an awful side project called Boys on the Radio that Shepard released in 2013. (This one-off pop-synth project — that I personally contributed funds toward on PledgeMusic — is so bad I am trying to forget it exists and will not mention it again.)
Reason number one I must prefer the 1999 EP to the 2015 LP is because of my impressionable youth and “neural nostalgia”, correct? I do have fond memories of the first time I popped The Drafting Sessions cassette into my car’s tape deck, but I don’t think that is it. By 1999 I was a senior in college, and my taste in music was far more refined than it had been in high school (and I was 23, beyond the 12–22 age range the Slate article mentions).
Lovedrug’s 2004 album Pretend You’re Alive is by far the best of all Shepard releases (even better than Kerith Ravine, as hard as that is for me to admit); and I don’t think this is an opinion. Based on all Lovedrug album reviews and press I have read over the last decade, most people feel the same way. And 2004 was long after my impressionable-period; I am far more objective about music from that year than I am from 1994. (The only problem I have with this album is minor: it should have led with the song “Blackout”.)
Pretend You’re Alive is the first of five Lovedrug full-length albums. What happened since? Why don’t I like the albums that followed anywhere near as much? For one, Michael Shepard is the only original member of the band. There have been countless musicians come and go. Based on my love for all Kerith Ravine music and the early Lovedrug stuff, I am assuming some credit is due to Adam Ladd for the 1999–2004 output and other collaborators/co-writers from that period.
Secondly, Lovedrug has unfortunately become less and less experimental and creative, and more and more formulaic and direct. Don’t get me wrong, let me reinforce Michael Shepard is a great musician and songwriter, and there are good songs on every Lovedrug release. But to explain my “less experimental and creative” opinion, let me use two songs as examples.
In 2008, Lovedrug released their third album, The Sucker Punch Show. This is the first track: https://lovedrug.bandcamp.com/track/01-let-it-all-out-2
Around the same time that album was probably being written, Kerith Ravine reconvened for a couple days. This is a quote from the Kerith Ravine Bandcamp page: “The members of Kerith Ravine reunited for two days in the summer of 2007. ‘From the Horse’s Eye’ was recorded during this brief session:” https://kerithravine.bandcamp.com/track/from-the-horses-eye-2
Whoa. That’s the same songwriter?! I think so, but maybe some other member of Kerith Ravine is so influential that the sound could be that radically different. I prefer ‘From the Horse’s Eye’ to every single song Shepard has released since; it is so intense, so dynamic, so powerful. To be fair, all of the rest of the songs on The Sucker Punch Show are far better than that first track. And once again, I like many Shepard songs from the last 8 years; it’s just that that one Kerith Ravine song from 2007 is so damn good.
Something happened in the few years between Lovedrug’s first and second albums that they began losing my interest. By “something”, I actually mean a few things. For one, the band got signed and then dropped by a major label. Then, as I already mentioned, all the original members of the band quit except Shepard. So a change in sound and direction was inevitable and understandable.
Even after those events, 2007’s Everything Starts Where it Ends showed great promise. It’s also where things seemed to go wrong (at least for me). That LP was preceded by an EP called “Everything Starts” which had three songs from the upcoming LP plus one outtake and one Nirvana cover. The first two songs, “Casino Clouds” and “Ghost By Your Side”, showed a new, catchier, more radio-friendly side of the band. I didn’t like it. But the other part of that EP, “American Swimming Lesson”, and the b-side “The Praxter” were stunning. “The Praxter” remains to be one of my top 5 Lovedrug songs to this day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H6wwVqjlKo
I don’t necessarily have a problem with Shepard writing catchier or radio-friendly songs. Pretend You’re Alive contained “Spiders”, which would have been perfect for the end-credits of Spider-Man 2, which was in theaters that year. But the heart of “Pretend You’re Alive” is tracks 5 through 7: the cinematic title track, the bad-ass rock song “Pandamoranda”, and the epic piano ballad “Down Towards the Healing”. What makes this album so great is it’s balance and diversity, and these three songs showcase the dynamics.
The balance mostly continued on Everything Starts Where it Ends and The Sucker Punch Show, but the short, catchy pop-rock songs became more and more prominent — and they are not the strength of Shepard or his band. While much of The Sucker Punch Show bores me, the seven-minute song “Panicked Witness” is terrific and harkens back to 2003. (I didn’t buy this album until this week, and I do like it far more now than I did when I first heard it in 2008.)
On the most recent two Lovedrug albums, 2012’s Wildblood and this year’s Notions, there is no balance nor diversity. Both albums contain 11 or 12 formulaic radio-friendly rock songs that are all of similar tempo, structure, and length (3–4 minutes).
About song length — to me it can be synonymous with creativity and quality. Simply, I love longer songs (6 minutes plus). Not that all short Lovedrug songs are bad, they are just more bland and of the same mold. Shepard’s longer songs contain more dynamics and more experimentation.
Here is a chart I created of every major Shepard release ranked in the order I like them (I left out all the Lovedrug EP’s because they generally contain songs that also appeared on the LP’s, and there are so many of them):
1. 2004 Pretend You’re Alive: Average song length 4:23
2. 1999 The Drafting Sessions: Average song length 6:22
3. 2001 Lined Up in Pairs We Wait for What Comes Next: Average song length 6:29
4. 2000 The Streams of Jettison: Average song length 6:58
5. 2007 Everything Starts Where it Ends: Average song length 4:18
6. 2008 The Sucker Punch Show: Average song length 4:16
7. 2015 Notions: Average song length 3:56
8. 2012 Wildblood: Average song length 3:54
With the exception of Pretend You’re Alive, I clearly prefer the releases with the longer songs.
So back to the original question at the beginning of this lengthy essay full of my strong opinions; maybe I like the 1999 song from the EP better because it is long? Maybe.
In reality, what I love most about The Drafting Sessions (and all Kerith Ravine and early Lovedrug songs) is the passion, the rawness, the energy. As good as the the new Lovedrug songs sound, they don’t have those same ingredients; I don’t hear the fervor nor the intensity. Shepard — and fans who prefer his recent work — probably view the passion I cite as immaturity, the rawness as sloppiness, and the intensity as a lack of control. And maybe lengthy songs as a display of the lack of ability to edit and refine.
I am thankful Michael Shepard continues to write and release music, and I will continue to buy it and listen as long as his career continues. As critical as I may be of the last couple of Lovedrug albums, I am thankful he has gone to so much effort to make all the Kerith Ravine and Lovedrug songs so easy to listen to and buy on Bandcamp. And maybe the opinions I share here aren’t shared by Shepard’s fan base; maybe you reading this think Notions is the best album he and his bandmates have every released — I do hope some people have that opinion, but I don’t know any.
In the meantime, I can’t help but daydream and wish that one day maybe he’ll write another song like this…
