I think as I look through my fave albums of the 2000s, and absolutely my fave albums of all times, they have had two things in common:a consistency of sound and a consistency of quality songs. Some are innovative, some are culminations, some are breakthroughs -there is no real rhyme or reason though except they don’t slacken, they don’t lose their grip on you, and from song to song they are dumbfoundingly great.
Satellite Rides wasn’t a break through, that occurred with their previous album Fight Songs, though it was a move away from the alterna-country rock which lumped em with Uncle Tupela, Bottle Rockets and others on their first first four albums. Satellite Rides is melodic pop rock with a good back beat. Not alternative, not classic, maybe indie though not arty. Neither a pop move nor not a move -the songs are very organic, very of a type, very very very good.
And from the second song “Rollerskate Skinny” (a reference to the sister in Catcher In The Rye) all the way through the penultimate “Book Of Poems” (which starts with a reference to Lolita) the eruditation is sharp though hardly surprising in a songwriter, leader Rhett Miller, who named a song for a Raymond Carver short story, every other song is a masterpiece.
Track four, “Bird In A cage” -“maybe, maybe I got a reason for living although I’m so tired”is one of those lines which if you don’t grasp it you and I are simply living different lives. The song, about a long distance romance going wrong (‘we got tangled up in telephone wires” as he noted in an earlier song, raves alongside the ache -the solo is tight and filled with self-control, and Miller sounds like he is singing from the depths of nowhere over a bad connection. Track Six, “What I Wouldn’t Do” is worthy of Crenshaw, Track Nine “Weightless” -which the band have recorded a coupla times, is a sharp and strange metaphor and I’ll let you read it for yourself:
I reckon Heaven is a place
Where time is nonexistent, yeah
And the things that are important, yeah
Don’t take any time at all
An awful lot like like outer space
Where everything is weightless, yeah
Even heavy things are weightless, yeah
Don’t take up any space at all
Right on, right on
Oh yeah it’s so clear
All the bad things are gone
All the good things are here
Almost exactly like this place
Where you and I are fighting, yeah
I’m so sick and tired of fighting, yeah
Up there we’ll never fight at all
I reckon Heaven is a place
Where everything is weightless, yeah
Even heavy things are weightless, yeah
Up there we’ll never fight at all.
That’s the stuff, right? Rhett would rerecord another song from Satellite Rides, “Question” for a post-wedding solo album (the question is “will you marry me?”) and it is sweet song he sings live ALL THE TIME -whether solo or with Old 97’s. There is an answer to it as well, the best song ever written, except for Prince’s “Head”, about seducing a girl who is about to married, “Designs On You”. “You can go ahead and get married and this can be our secret thing,” the dashing young Miller tells “Annette”, “I won’t tell a sole except the people in the nightclub where I sing”. And, yes, Helen, he is wagging his dick in her face, but sweetly: “I don’t wanna get you all worked up except secretly I do”. It’s all come on and pretty comical except all of Millers seductions can turn grim on a dime. On a free live EP with the album (yeah, those were the days) Miller plays one of his oldies “Barrier Reef”. In “Barrier Reef” he claims to be a serial lady killer and the girl replies “‘I’m already dead’ and that’s exactly what she said'”. Uh oh.
Things can get pretty bad on Satellite Rides as well: on “Book Of Poems” the band settles into a problem for so many singer songwriters (I think it’s true of all writers): “I’ve got a real bad feeling that a book of poems ain’t enough”. It’s a great song. All of these are great songs and “Book Of Poems” is all guitar and backbeat backbiting another romantic deadend.
The complaint is Satellite Rides is a little poppy but that’s kinda dumb, it is a pop-rock album with the accent on the rocK: it swings hard nearly always and if not as hard as say “Doreen” certainly as hard as “Busted Afternoon”. Many years later Miller would write “I’m going to write this song forever about a girl that I once knew and she is always leaving, this is what I do”. Old 97’s never did it better than on Satellite Rides.
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