Pynchon Music: The City Streets

Pynchon Connection

The music of the City Streets is filled with literary allusions and inspirations—the first track on their debut album bears the Joycean title, “A Portrait of a Slacker as a Young Man”; Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are referenced in songs and liner notes; and their song “Labyrinthine” has clear Borgesian references, along with haiku poetry. The last track on The Jazz Age is called “Slothrop’s Ghost,” and references characters and settings from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. The liner notes mention the novel by name, as well as Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves—which makes sense for an album chronicling a marriage in decay.

Spermatikos Logos asked songwriter Rick Reid about the inspirations for “Slothrop’s Ghost,” and Reid had this to say:

Review: The Jazz Age

Rick Reid describes The Jazz Age as a “loose concept record about the birth and death of a marriage; with an unexpected rebirth as denouement.” As one might expect from this synopsis, Reid’s heartfelt and self-aware lyrics are at the album’s emotional core. Reid belongs to the tradition of singer-songwriters who take delight in poetic irony and literate wordplay, and lines like “I called you from Chicago inside the creeping dawn/I told you of the madness but not what I was on” and “I buried my first love in a thousand songs” are delivered with a huskiness that’s signaled “honest street poetry” since Springsteen first picked up a microphone.

Reid is also lead guitarist, and the band’s sound clearly reflects his lyrical moods. Recorded in 2010, The Jazz Age is anchored in a late-nineties/early-naughts foundation of earnest authenticity; early Wilco, Goo Goo Dolls, and Dashboard Confessional all come to mind. Although the City Streets are often described as “power pop,” their music is more about momentum and mood than big riffs and catchy hooks. However, Leddy’s thick, driving bass gives the songs a satisfying heft, a postpunk bravado that allows them to punch above their weight class—a little more Replacements than Wallflowers. This is particularly evident in the standout opening track, “Midnight Sun,” which builds from a rumble to a powerful, chiming chorus; or the Thin Lizzy boogie of “Irish Rose,” the most playful track on the album. (It also contains the wonderful lyric, “Baby since you been gone I’ve been wearing all your clothes.”)

The Jazz Age concludes with “Slothrop’s Ghost,” the longest track on the album. A song about a couple cautiously falling in love again, it begins as an acoustic ballad, a world-weary confession by a disillusioned romantic. Eventually self-doubt is cast away and the tempo increases, the song becoming a full-on rocker and picking up a fiddle or two along the way. As the crescendo builds, Reid defiantly adopts Roger Mexico’s great surrender from Gravity’s Rainbow—“Fuck the war. We’re in love.”