"I'm Always In Love"

SONG: "I'm Always In Love"
ALBUM: Summerteeth
TRACK: 5

I can't believe I let a whole month go by without posting. And I was off to such a good start! Well, consider this my return to form. I'm gonna try harder to post regularly, if not terribly often, from now on. However, it's now past midnight so my good intentions have to be channeled into a short, sweet, simple post. So I've picked a short, sweet, and simple song.

Right off the bat, that synthesizer leaps out of the speakers. The melody echoes The Cure's "Just Like Heaven", but the tone is more in line with the power-pop of The Cars. The song itself features many of the recurring elements in Summerteeth: a catchy tune, dark and conflicted lyrics, and a Beatles homage. Tweedy sings about having "a heart full of holes", "[letting] go of your throat-sweet throttle", and sinking until "I forget my mother". Yet by the time the chorus rolls around, he feels like he could "set the sun / on a big-wheeled wagon" as the keyboard theme swells up again. These confused emotions can be seen as symbolic of a kind of manic depression -- made all the more clear as he ends the song with a repeating coda of "I'm worried / I'm always in love".

The Beatles homage is, of course, the harmonized chant of "smoke pot, smoke pot" that bassist John Stirratt intones in the background of the bridge. Wilco lifted this from the psychedelic outro of "I Am The Walrus". This is ironic, considering "Walrus" fades out to the sound of voices drifting through radio static -- a technique Wilco would borrow on their next album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It just goes to show, practically every trick in modern rock music owes a debt to the Fab Four.