2000 // Mary Lou Lord + Sean Na Na, Split EP // “Princess and the Pony”
Reviews: Austin Chronicle // Robert Christgau // The War Against Silence
Profiles & Interviews: Minneapolis City Pages // Splendid Ezine
I tried to like Mary Lou Lord, but a slim few of her songs ever really interested me — especially the ones on this EP. The reason I have it is for the Sean Na Na tracks.
There are some artists who manage to successfully transition from a childhood career as a musician to functioning adult artist. It seems like this was more common in the old world of music — take someone like Dolly Parton or Scott Walker, for instance. Off the top of my head, there’s three recent examples of this phenomenon in the indie rock world who’ve had mixed success: Ben Lee, Ben Kweller and Sean Tillman (AKA Sean Na Na).
Of course, in the midst of researching to report that Tillman — who first achieved acclaim as a teenager in the band Calvin Krime, then followed his turn as Sean Na Na with the Har Mar Superstar project — had fallen off the face of the earth, I found that the opposite was true.
How could I have been so ridiculous? After years of following his career, I should have realized that, like, say, an earthworm, he’ll totally regenerate when dealt with a cutting setback. The last I’d heard was that Dim Mak put out a relatively unremarkable Sean Na Na comeback record in 2007. Well, of course, a little Googling led me to discover that Har Mar Superstar is poised for a comeback — in a few weeks, even! And, the icing on that cake: TIllman is even bringing Calvin Krime back together to play the Minneapolis afterparty for an upcoming Har Mar gig.
Like I said, I should have known that he wouldn’t just slink into the shadows, never to be heard from until someone resuscitates his career fifteen years from now.
“The Princess and the Pony” was the first song of his I ever heard; I vaguely knew about Calvin Krime, but wasn’t a big fan. And it was so amazing, when I went to see him live in the Emo’s little room, probably sometime in 2000, he did R’n’B covers! Without being snide or hipper-than-thou about it. Now, I know this doesn’t seem remarkable now, what with the ironic cover being a tired old dated staple of the indie rock world. But at the time, this was really amazingly cool. (Of course, in hindsight, it’s clear Tillman took those elements of his live show on to his next performance persona, Har Mar Superstar.)
I would be remiss not to write about how much I love this song; I’ve reached a phase in my life where I’m less interested in lyrics that tell a story, but there was a time when this was pretty much a requirement for me to like a song — a time I’d say spanned the decade from 1994 t0 2003 or so. (See yesterday’s entry on Neko Case, for instance — or the inevitable upcoming entries on The Long Winters, John Vanderslice and The Mountain Goats.)
I imagine this preference was borne of listening to a lot of Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez and the Eagles and Elton John and Fleetwood Mac and Don McClean and Jackson Browne and Harry Nilsson as a kid. But, as my palate’s become a bit more broad in my old age, I find that I now appreciate lyrics that are sometimes just lovely words strung together that may or may not make sense in a poetical way (New Order, Interpol, Cocteau Twins, etc), or bands that manage to write songs that do both (Arcade Fire, Magnetic Fields, Shearwater). Which is not to say that I don’t still appreciate the good epic ballad, but you know how these things shift and slide over time.
I still find this song fascinating, though. And the funny thing is, I guess I’ve always heard a different story here than everyone else: More than one review (Christgau’s even!) mentions that the song is about Tillman’s future funeral. To me, though, it always seemed that in this song Tillman was actually in conversation with a friend, a girl hooked on heroin. He gets on her case about it, and she just instructs him how to conduct her funeral. But perhaps I’ve heard it wrong?
ETA: I forgot to mention this song has one of my favorite lines in any song, ever: “Shake your ass around my casket.”
ETA to the ETA: Oh, it would seem that I was kinda misreading this all along, but I still maintain that this song is a conversation, and not just a monologue.
