PB&Jams: Bad Books
When one of the Dartbeat editors and I told our editor-in-chief about the title for this column, her response was something along the lines of “frankly, no.” The argument was that it’s not funny because my initials are not P.B. She clearly doesn’t understand my propensity for peanut butter or the disastrous combination of liking bad puns and having little skill for coming up with clever titles.
This column isn’t quite a music review, because I’d prefer to just talk about things that I dig. So rather than critique any given song, album or artist, I’m going to suggest something that I’m into and tell you why.
When choosing the topic for my first piece, I copped out and decided to start with the most-played song in my iTunes library — “It Never Stops” off the album II by Bad Books.
Bad Books is a collaboration of musician Kevin Devine and Andy Hull, frontman and songwriter for indie rock band Manchester Orchestra.
The two met in spring of 2007 while touring with Long Island-based alt rock band Brand New. Hull and Devine first teamed up to cover a song by Neutral Milk Hotel and during the tour played on stage with each others’ bands nearly every night.
They got together to play around with the idea of recording a few songs and ended up putting out a record. Their project would be called Bad Books and the duo released the first album, self-titled Bad Books, in 2010.
2012 saw the debut of their second album, the not so creatively titled II. The record ranges from the catchy and comical “Forest Whitaker,” described by Devine as a “character sketch about a failed relationship” to the slower and heavier “42,” which Hull says references a “fictitious father that cares more about drinking than his family.”
“It Never Stops”
Devine describes the storyline of “It Never Stops” as focusing on a two-day run of “playing weekend in the middle of the week” with a close friend and “that blurry line when you’re friends with someone and you have feelings that are more than that, but you don’t really trust your own judgment as to where they sit.”
The chorus will grab you every time with, “I know, you know/ I wanna love you but I can’t let go/Honey, it never stops, no, it never stops”
Forest Whitaker
Forest Whitaker, the last song they wrote for the album, is a back-and-forth dialogue between a man and his “kind of hippy-ish ex-girlfriend who I would imagine is toting crystals and naming her kid Forest Whitaker.”
The song has elements of witty banter with lines like, “You started a band, that was cool for a while but it turned pretty bland” and the biting observation, “You started a job/that you hate when you’re sober and hate even more when you’re not/I know you hate me too, you always say you do."
Pyotr
“Pyotr” recounts the legend of Russian Czar Pyotr the Great, who allegedly found his wife Catherine cheating on him and proceeded to behead her lover. He put the head on display to punish her, saying that if she loved him so much she should be around him all the time.
The song bounces between the perspective of the lover and of Pyotr with dark lyrics like, “And I know I am not the man you desire/I know you think that I am some kind of fool/and I know you would gaze in his eyes forever/ I’ve figured out just how to give that to you.”