#105, “39,” The Cure (2000)

150 Favorite Songs: #105, “39,” The Cure (2000)

The album this song came from, 2000’s Bloodflowers, wasn’t a favorite of mine. It came out just after the apex of my Cure fandom, when the wave had fully crested and, while it hadn’t yet receded, would do so soon, because that’s how waves work. Before Bloodflowers, my friends and I spent all of our time trying to track down every Cure b-side ever recorded—a tough task in the pre-Spotify days, when even Napster only had a fraction of what we were looking for. (“Dredd Song,” the song they wrote for the Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd movie? Easy. “I Dig You,” a b-side to a 7” single the band had released in 1979 exclusively in Canada, New Zealand, and the UK under the name “Cult Hero”? I wouldn’t hear that until like 2014.)

The idea behind Bloodflowers is that it completed a trilogy of records that were meant to appeal to fans who loved the band’s 1982 goth breakthrough Pornography and its 1989 creative peak, Disintegration. I never heard those two records as part of a trilogy, personally—Pornography is moody and thumping, Disintegration is lush and mysterious—so I mostly heard the claim that this album completed a trilogy as a way for the band to apologize for Wish and Wild Mood Swings, the two albums that preceded it, both of which were poppier, contained radio hits, and were all over the map, stylistically. They were also my favorite albums by the band, so a release framed as “sorry, we’re sorry, we’re trying to remove it” didn’t exactly speak to me. I bought a copy of Bloodflowers on CD in 2000, listened to it three or four times, and then my interested in the band slipped for a decade or so.

Then, in 2013, I had a really good day. I remember it well: It was early October and the weather was perfect. Kat was busy all day, so I had a really nice Saturday all to myself. Austin City Limits, the massive music festival that took over Zilker Park every year, had just switched from being a single-weekend affair to a fest that repeated itself over two weekends, and this change to the format meant that scalpers didn’t know how much tickets were worth, or how many to buy, so the market for the second weekend collapsed. (Sorry to these scalpers.) I looked online, saw that I could get a pass for Saturday for thirty dollars, and realized that if I got on my bike, I could ride to the park on a pretty day, pay thirty dollars, and watch Wilco, Kendrick Lamar, and The Cure all afternoon. It sounded pretty great to me, so that’s exactly what I did.

I walked through the gates just as Wilco was playing “California Stars,” listened to them for an hour, then got a sandwich and watched Kendrick play most of Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, before settling in for The Cure. And suddenly, the Cure fandom that had waned over the past decade-plus just roared back to life. The set was everything I wanted—they played my favorite songs from Wish and Wild Mood Swings, songs that’ll be on this list later—and also, they played “39,” from Bloodflowers, a song I did not recall every actually hearing during the three or four cursory listens I gave the album in 2000.

“39” caught me immediately, though. The song is vintage late-90’s Cure, starting with some spacey keyboards that quickly get undercut with a rumbling bassline before the drums start to thump and a guitar part slices its way in intermittently, everything unfolding with a patience that borders on pomposity (this intro stretches for well over a minute). Then Robert Smith starts singing another hymn to depression—“so the fire is almost out / and there’s nothing left to burn,” he starts, and lest you wonder if he’s speaking literally, he clarifies quickly that, no, he is talking about his own creative life. “i’ve run right out of thoughts / and i’ve run right out of words.” He’s done, basically, with rock and roll, singing his goodbye, his burnt-out explanation that he can’t keep faking it. “The fire is almost out / and there’s nothing left to burn,” he sings, noting that he’s spent half his life to that point as an iconic figure in rock and roll, and pleading that he was done.

It struck me. Robert Smith had started The Cure when he was thirteen, and the band became famous relatively quickly—they had their first record deal a few weeks after his eighteenth birthday, released its first single a year later, had a hit with “Boys Don’t Cry” just as he turned twenty, had four albums—big ones, too, Three Imaginary Boys, Seventeen Seconds, Faith, and Pornography—in the can before he was twenty-three. Disintegration, the band’s biggest record, came late into its career—it was the eighth Cure album, its first single (“Lullaby”) was the twenty-second single the band released, they already had three different greatest hits records by that point. It just all caught my ear—of course he was tired.

But also, the song was called “39,” which isn’t really that old at all. I was already on the other side of thirty myself that night at Zilker Park, also tired of trying to burn words for fuel in pursuit of my dreams, and I found it comforting—in a way that The Cure hadn’t been comforting to me since I was a teenager—to know that I could find in The Cure’s music this feeling, more adult and relevant to me at that point than, say, “A Letter to Elise” (a song whose lyrics I hand-printed in a break-up note to a high school girlfriend when I was sixteen; I really am so sorry).

The song is, like many later-era Cure songs, really long, without striving to be epic. It runs nearly seven and a half minutes, but it doesn’t bother with a big hook or dramatic changes. Rather, it conveys its point through the way it stretches its motifs (the song has three verses, a chorus, a refrain, a pre-chorus, and a bridge, but there are also only like fifty different words in the entire song) to build drama, which is an underrated part of what The Cure do well, something it’s easy to ignore because sometimes Robert Smith enjoys building out a narrative and telling a story in his songs—there’s often less substance to their music than you think (complimentary), because they use so much texture and create so much drama that you kind of assume you’ve been listening to something with more specificity than it actually has.

And so I remember standing there in Zilker Park, having gone through “Open” and “A Night Like This” and “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea” and “In Between Days” and “Want” and “One Hundred Years” and “End” and having the time of my life. Then, suddenly, I found this song where I wasn’t just tripping on the nostalgia of old feelings, but hearing the stirrings of a new one, and it was thrilling. I don’t think I’m really at the place Robert Smith was in when he wrote “39”—I am fueled by many things, some of which I barely understand!—but it was nonetheless exciting to learn that, when I looked, I could find a song directly and specifically expressing a kind of middle-aged creative burnout that had just been sitting on a shelf for more than a decade, from the same person whose songs about heartbreak had spoken to me as a teenager.