Shotgun and Jaybird: "Marquee Glass"

Chalk up points for both Hepburn and Nezar in the subjective/scientific music criticism debate.

On the one hand, maybe it’s pure subjectivity that makes this track something far more to me than any of the other songs on Shotgun & Jaybird’s newest EP. The things the lyrics talk about are exactly the sorts of experiences I had with one person, and the way those experiences are arranged into thoughts and feelings are pretty much the very way that I thought and felt about those experiences. So maybe that should be nothing to me, maybe I should be all, “Hey, been there, Shotgun, done that, Jaybird.” But, actually, no, I really shouldn’t because here’s the still subjective yet Amir-pleasing part: the music behind these plaintive hopes is pitch-fucking-perfect accompaniment.

In fact, the track’s all music for the first minute and a half. The extended instrumental intro has Dick Morello and “Shotgun” Jimmie picking out graceful slow-burn on their guitars with Paul Henderson grazing the cymbals, a northern twang warbling out the edges of the fretwork and bringing the sound somewhere between a bass-less Harvest and a sedated Lonesome Crowded West. The instrumental effortlessly opens up to more volume and a dominant guitar figure while the long verse that follows works backwards just as naturally through that same progression. In the sturdy gut of the arrangement, the lyrics are at their most metaphorical, with talk of leaving behind a world “made of water and dust” and “seven scenic temples” and painting a room. Basic gist: the speaker and the spoken-to inhabit the world of the struggling artist. The speaker becomes more direct (“Of all the things that should be guessed at / You will do your best with / Everything you try”) as the music echoes the middle section of the opening, and on it goes until the song comes full circle to the first of the intro’s three parts, a hushed plea transforming the past into a present command: “So take me on a tour, a many-sided tour of your hometown / Show me where you did all your first things / Drive me by the farm, by the house, by where you grew up / Tell me how you have become yourself.”

The wonderful cyclical structure completed, Shotgun & Jaybird up the ante, using half a minute of controlled clang to separate the verse from the coda, an affecting conclusion whose words dream a future while its guitar tweaks the first melody, now reprised more closely by the vocals. That final repeated stanza, just 35 seconds, is what really puts this song up and away into my top echelon of truly, deeply loved music: “I wanna see your name in lights / Right across the street from where I am playing / Shining through the marquee glass / Individual letters just like you and me.” And don’t think it’s not worth a meaningful million that those lines are delivered by a boy-girl harmony (“girl” made possible by Julie Doiron).

In a particularly lucid reader mail response to the articles by Hepburn and Nezar, “russell” notes that the higher an album ranks on a Pitchfork best of decade list, the less the writer has to say about that album, the more reductive the criticism, to the point where the endorsement becomes little more than, “You just have to hear it.” For us hopeless music lovers, though, “You just have to hear it” is a statement worth manifestos. 500 words or so about “Marquee Glass” hardly seems enough.