#36, “Sunken Treasure,” Wilco (1996)

150 Favorite Songs: #36, “Sunken Treasure,” Wilco (1996)

Many years ago, when I first moved to Austin, I spent a lot of time walking around the city, an honest-to-gosh Walkman on my hip because mp3 players were still very expensive, and I needed music with me all the time. I would make myself mixtapes, just collections of songs, many of which would go on to occupy an important place in my heart, that were first making their way onto a list like this one. And I would walk from the apartment that Carl and Fernando and Jim and I shared down on South First and Barton Springs up across the river, through downtown, up to the Drag, which is what the area near campus is called. Back then, the Drag was cool, dotted with record stores and bookstores and vintage shops and coffee shops (and bubble tea, for some reason, bubble tea was unavoidable for a few years there). These days, most of those things are gone.

That was a nice stretch of my life. I was broke all the time, trying desperately to get a job somewhere cool or interesting (it took a while; I worked briefly at the university bookstore, which is not like a regular bookstore job, then did a couple of weeks at Starbucks, before landing at Half Price Books), but felt free and happy—or, like, sad but in a way that is indistinguishable from happy, if you’re prone to melancholy. I wrote on LiveJournal and in notebooks and sometimes when I had an extra dollar or two I could take the bus instead of walking.

And I didn’t know how any of it would work out. I’d moved to Austin from San Antonio, which had been a grim time in my life, and I was determined not to wash out—but there is a story that people who move to Austin from South Texas often tell themselves about whether they can make it there, and I had heard from many of my friends who’d tried to make a go of living in the big, cool city only to end up living with their parents a year or so later that it’s hard to make enough money, to keep up with how intimidating it feels, to deal with imposter syndrome. I was extremely focused on making sure that wasn’t my story, too.

So I wandered around, headphones on, listening to music and trying to make the city feel small enough to fit inside of me. Walking helps with that. It was a three mile walk from that apartment to Mojo’s, the coffee shop I liked best, and doing that walk made the city feel a little smaller. (That’s a trick that works most places, I’ve found, having put many miles beneath my feet in Chicago and London and Los Angeles and other places, too.)

All of this, weirdly, is jumbled up with Wilco in my mind. My relationship to that band is weird. I recognize that they should be important to me, me being a white guy in his forties who first heard Yankee Hotel Foxtrot when he was twenty-one years old. I have friends who are deeply invested in the band, who know Jeff Tweedy’s childhood nickname, who have strong opinions on what the best songs on Cruel Country or Sky Blue Sky are, both of which are albums I have no idea if I’ve even listened to. For some reason, my interest in the band faded pretty quickly, and I don’t have a lot of nostalgia tied to them. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sounds to me like what would happen if The Eagles discovered a box of guitar pedals. I rarely listen to the band now (though Summerteeth is a nice album).

But there were a lot of Wilco songs on those mixtapes, because that stretch in my life when I first moved to Austin coincided with the stretch when I found listening to the band compelling. And “Sunken Treasure,” which is the song that starts off the second side of the band’s second album, a double record called Being There, has always sounded to me very much like that time in my life. Not just because I listened to it so much, but because, I think, of why I listened to it. It felt like a warning that I really needed at that moment.

“Sunken Treasure” is full of vivid imagery, from its very first line, about “rows and rows of houses with windows painted blue” and on and on throughout, the sea black with ink, the mountain he’d try to fold over, the leaves burning in the autumn fire. It has a place and sets a scene very effectively, and surprisingly economically; for a seven-minute song, there aren’t very many actual lines in it, but the ones that are here are do their job. And all of those images felt, to me, of a kind with my experience of walking around Austin, headphones on and a notebook in my backpack. It fits very well with the drop-D tuning of the song, the chaotic jazz drums that grow throughout the song, until the thing descends into a cacophony of dissonant guitar noises and distortion that sound like a gathering storm that somehow breaks into something softer, acoustic again. And then there’s the line from which the song takes its name: There is no sunken treasure, which seemed so profound to me at the time.

Listening to “Sunken Treasure” now, and reading the lyrics, which I’ve pulled up in front of me, whatever meaning I found in that line seems entirely imposed onto it by twenty-two year old Dan and not inherent to the text. The song is nominally a breakup song, I guess, and “there is no sunken treasure” doesn’t receive any real context. But when I heard it back then, walking the streets of this city that I desperately wanted to belong in, it sounded like wisdom, like a cautionary tale—don’t keep chasing something you’re not sure is real. if you start doing that, you’ll never reach a point at which it makes sense to stop. find something real, and hold onto that, instead. you can decide for yourself what treasure you' seek.

Of course, it’s clear when you break the song down that none of that is actually in “Sunken Treasure”—but if you’d asked me before I sat down to write about the song, I’d have told you that was what it was about, and been confident in that interpretation. And I think that actually speaks to what’s remarkable about it. The song is such a mood-setter, from that guitar sound to the weary way in which Jeff Tweedy sings those lyrics, to the heavy crash of the final minute, that it feels like it must be deeper than it is. And feeling that way actually makes it that, which is the lesson I needed to learn about myself as I was trying to make a home in a new place. Ultimately, what we find in these things is often what we put there. There is no sunken treasure, but there doesn’t need to be one, either.