Oh, Those Power-pop Blues... - Jon Auer

There was something characteristically ironic, if not downright sarcastic, in The Posies' choice to split up and name their 1998 album, ‘Success’.  Not only was its elegantly angry folk-pop at odds with any chart-centric notion of that word, by the late nineties the band itself was falling apart.  Guitarist and vocalist Jon Auer’s divorce, soured band-member relationships, creative frustrations -- all contributed to the band‘s exhaustion.  It seemed like a confusingly fractured time for The Posies, but somehow it made sense that the man to pick up the pieces and construct something unexpectedly attractive was Jon Auer. 

For him, smiling through gritted teeth was something you could somehow do with a guitar, and much of The Posies’ back catalogue testifies to his knack for kindling smouldering six-string passive-aggression behind pretty folk-duo harmonies.  His sensibility fit perfectly with the task of interpreting personal and Posies-related darkness, hence 'The Year of Our Demise', which (prefaced by ‘Songs From...’) eventually became the title of his 2006 solo debut.  It was the first step in a nine-year emotional trawl that cut deeper than he could have predicted.

"I tried to use the record as therapy," he says, precariously seated in a sordid London Borderline storage room, his back to a wall scratched-up with what may well have been someone's last words, "And funnily enough, it took so ****in' long that it ended up costing me more than a therapist probably would have." 

The work of turning the concept into actual songs began five years ago, and ended with a four-month recording “marathon” that required a level of isolation not exactly in line with any conventional pursuit of mental health.  "When you spend ****in' ten to fifteen hours in a room by yourself making music, it can drive you crazy.  I mean there was no one else around.  What’s that cliché, that thing about staring into the abyss and the abyss stares back at you?  Sometimes I’d be alone in the studio working on a song that had a lot of heavy subject matter and it would be really wearing on my psyche to work on it over and over again." 

Stonewalling outside pressure even at the risk of alienating loved ones became simply part of the process.  "It got to the point where I didn’t talk to my record company in the States -- they were not happy with me.  They were like 'What the **** is taking so long?' and my wife asked me, 'What do you do every night when you go away for hours and hours and hours, and I never see you, and you come home when I’m going to work, and you look horrible, you feel horrible,  you’re stressed...' And I said, 'Well, I’m trying to finish this, I’m working on it,' and they were all like, 'Whatever'  It wasn’t very encouraging, but I eventually got through it, showed up with the record -- handed it to the record company.  They were like, “Oh, ok.  This is good…  We’re really ****in’ relieved that it’s actually decent and that now we know what you were doing with the time."    

The result of all that time actually sounds nothing like years of self-doubt and catharsis.  ‘Songs...’ is largely mild-mannered in a Fleetwood-Mac-staring-out-the-window-on-a-rainy-day kind of way, with a typically razor-sharp sense of melody and lyrical precision.  In fact, everything is well put to the point of appearing bewilderingly disassociated from the initial mess of dysfunctional relationships.  But however bleak Auer’s inspiration was, thankfully ‘Songs...’ isn’t about making us feel his pain.  He's cleaned up the chaos, the unsightly emotional viscera and presents us with a kind of eerily tranquil scenery charged with the sensation that some bad, bad things have happened here.