Description
Love songs are like identical gingerbread cookies in a shop window: cute, sweet, but cloying after a minute. Here, instead of sugar, there are rusty nails piled up in a heap. You can build a mountain out of them, or you can just admire their uselessness. In any case, it's more honest than yet another “he” and “she” accompanied by a boring chorus.
Instead of romantic nostalgia, there is anger, sarcasm, and a healthy weariness of banalities. But anger works like sandpaper here: it scrapes away the surface and then reveals something real. And when, suddenly, in this prickly tirade, the confession “it's hard to love, but it's possible” appears, it doesn't sound saccharine, but like a reward for honesty.
In the end, it's not about love as an eternal fairy tale, but about love as hard work - with nails, with bitterness, but also with cigarettes in the sun. And that's definitely better than any radio song.
Producer: Neko Case
Writer: Neko Case and Paul Rigby
Additional production: Tucker Martin
Mixing: Tucker Martin and Neko Case
Recording: Jeff Galeger
Additional sound engineers: Tucker Martin, Darryl Neudorf, and John Hagler
Vocal arrangements and field recordings: Neko Case
Mastering: Heba Kadri
Neko Case: vocals, backing vocals, bells
Rachel Flotard: backing vocals
Paul Rigby: guitars
Sebastian Steinberg: bass
Adam Schatz: keyboards
Lyrics and translation
Original
Love songs mostly, sound the same
An exercise in futility, for me
But there's a few who get away with it
They've some divergent insight I can't find
And they deride me
"No one forced you to fall in love like you did
No one tricked you
And you weren't faking it
But they got cold feet or changed their minds
Cause they got scared or they got bored"
Now we're in this boring story
That feels unjustly spoiled
Its shelf-life insult to injury
"Did you tell him you're not going to build his house?
Left the nails in a pile
To form a rusty mountain?
Some people need to hurt somebody, anyone
You may as well have been a stranger..."
You may as well have been one
I round on this chorus with most unholy gorge
Take your radio and shove it!
All your "he's" and "she's" and rhyming "love"
I'm not special and I never was
No cruelty made a muse of me, see?
Just a two fisted son-of-a-bitch
With no sickening nostalgia for this
The same old cloying story
The same flypaper tongues
We all deserve better
Than some love song
So tell him you're not going to build his house!
Leave the nails in a pile
To form a rusty mountain
Some people need to have somebody, anyone
You may as well have been a stranger
You may as well have been one
And now that someone really loves me
I can see that I'm not easy to love
It took some divergent insight long in finding
But now you're here and you kindly remind me
That I am not a stranger
If I ever was
Gonna build this rusty mountain
'Til we smoke cigarettes on the sun
We all deserve better
Than a love song