#121, "Constructive Summer," The Hold Steady (2008)

150 Favorite Songs: #121, “Constructive Summer,” The Hold Steady (2008)

So much of what “Constructive Summer” means to me is tied into the time I found it. Those were not my happiest days, those months early in 2008. We were paying many thousands of dollars a month to live in Zone 3 London and I had no one to hang out with and I had just started receiving rejections to the query letters I'd been sending regarding the novel I'd recently completed. Not rejections of the novel, mind you—no one actually wanted to read the book to tell me they weren't interested. They were rejecting the idea of having me send them the first fifty pages. I had spent several years writing and performing, touring the country reading and publishing poems, making zines, and basically just saying yes to every opportunity I could find with the hope that I would come out of it with something new to say, and I just learned that none of that shit counted, in the eyes of the editors and agents I was trying to reach. It held no currency in the more professional world I was trying to enter.

(It's also quite directly what led me to pursue journalism—I realized that no one would read the book if I had no credentials, and that the things I had thought were my credentials were actually not interesting to anyone. I set out a goal to get published in four or five reputable outlets, all of which would improve my resume to the point I could get people to reject the book after reading it, rather than before. Which I accomplished, and which they did, both with that book and with the one that was eventually published, many, many times over.)

Anyway. Through all of that, there were two songs that I found that felt very much like the friends I wished I'd made in London. One of them, “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror” by Jeffrey Lewis, appears (quite high) on this list. The other is “Constructive Summer.” I'd never really cared for the Hold Steady before they released the album this song opens, Stay Positive. Sometimes I can be contrary, and the band felt like it was so calibrated to appeal to someone like me (white, into guitar rock, literary pretensions) that I just decided not to give them any of my time. I still get nervous around stuff that I’m demographically supposed to like (I’ve never listened to Run The Jewels either).

After listening to Stay Positive, though, I really felt like I was less alone. This is what music is good for when you are a teenager, and it is what music can do—less often, but still sometimes—even when you are a grown-up. When it happens now, it feels so much more valuable, based on its scarcity.

The first line—“Me and my friends are like / the drums on ‘Lust For Life’”—hit me square in my expat isolation. I really missed my friends. It goes on to get all Springsteen-y, about working in a mill and drinking with your buddies on water towers, but then that chorus rolls in—“We're gonna build something this summer,” is all it says—and it sounds so inspiring when you put it that way. Just build something. Together. It's not a grand ambition, not specific, not even based in having completed anything—it's just about building. The act of creation, in a way that makes that itself feel big. Where I was at in 2008, when I first heard this song, that was a really important concept.

There are others, too. “Let this be my annual reminder that we can all be something bigger.” “Getting older makes it harder to remember / we are our only savior.” “Raise a toast to Saint Joe Strummer.” All of these lines that felt ripped from my notebook. It took me a long time to understand how I felt about the second half of that year in London, to figure out the ways it changed me that I never noticed at the time. And it's a little weird, by the time you're in your late twenties, to attribute some of that change to a song. But when I think about being in that tiny flat on Hornsey Road above the off-license, I'm usually sitting at the table typing, headphones on so I don't wake Kat, listening to this song and planning what it is I'm going to build.

Also, just for fun, here’s a cover of this song by Deer Tick, which I’d never heard until I was looking for thumbnail art for this post. Thanks, Google.