Ahead of the release of I’ll Be Romance, the actor and musician discuses a key influence
What does a great song show us? How do we understand ourselves by it? Rarely have these questions been so elegiacally answered for me than in Smog’s “Drinking at the Dam,” a song that continues to instruct my emotional life and impacted the making of my forthcoming record, I’ll Be Romance.
In the song, Smog’s frontman, Bill Callahan, relates a teenage memory of the titular activity (youthful drinking = relatable narrative = good thing to display in a song!). But this is not a strictly narrative song. It’s also an allegory about the capacity of a song, and therefore a crucial lesson about our human capacity. What can we, and song, confront? What do we, and song, contain?
The narrator in this song describes a memory of being young, cutting class, and drinking beers at a local dam. He drinks with some jarhead teenagers, there’s pornography magazines left in the brambles, they all yell “abuse” to soothe the pain of being young, and these memories are told in the gentle swing of the music. This is the “first part of life,” and the song’s. An equation here might be: youth + constraints = harm / learning.
These are potent images that plot the adulthood contained in youth, forced upon it, even (potent images = good songwriting = potent living?) But the magic of Callahan’s approach is that he exacerbates these images by complicating what time will do to them, when the “second is the rest.” He overwrites the song we just heard: jarheads are changed into “teenage war chests,” soon to be “filled” with the government’s “dirty work”, and grief suddenly fills the memories: the “power is so much”. Here, Callahan intercepts the song with symbolic recognition (drinking at the dam = emotion abatement / “holding back what I can”) but he goes further and reaches into the allegoric, multiplied capacity of songwriting: singer = dam, song = dam, consciousness = dam. Everything a song could be must be dammed to make the one you hear; everything a life and mind can be must be dammed to make the one you live.
This allegorical switch-up left its mark on me. When I first heard the song at 23, after my father’s passing, it symbolized the injection of grief into my youth. Then, it formulated my attempts and failures to keep grief at bay: grief = river, me = dam, and dam = limited human capacity to process life. Soon, it passed softly into my canon of great songs, and later, its lessons became a cornerstone of my writing on I’ll Be Romance.
All this to say: a good song displays a consciousness, but a great song arrays the capacity of a consciousness being reworked by time. This song taught me a valuable equation of living, grieving, and even songwriting: that we can only “hold back” so much (grief, experience, inspiration, joy) before “the power is so much,” and then, we must express. Soon, that will be too much, and we’ll have to concede. We’ll return to “drinking at the dam.” And the water will rush on.
