#79, “Soldier Girl,” The Polyphonic Spree (2002)

150 Favorite Songs: #79, “Soldier Girl,” The Polyphonic Spree (2002)

I spent most of 2002 deeply obsessed with “Soldier Girl,” and by extension the Polyphonic Spree. If we were friends then, you probably got tired of hearing me talk about it.

I’ve written a bit so far here about what it was like for me to move to Austin from San Antonio when I was twenty-two. I had been miserable living in San Antonio, felt trapped and stuck and like my life was maybe over in a weird way I couldn’t defend if asked to, but also nobody was asking, which was a big part of the problem. It took me a few months to realize that I could just… move, and start over in a new place, and then I did that.

The old line is “wherever you go, there you are”—you’re the constant in any situation, after all—and I knew that to be true but I also very much wanted to try my best to test it. And right around the time I moved to Austin, this band from Dallas called the Polyphonic Spree recorded an album called The Beginning Stages of… that sounded like nothing else I listened to.

They were a weird band, the Polyphonic Spree. Still are, I suppose, except that they’ve been around for twenty-plus years now and had a few hits, so I guess that makes them more normal simply because there are a few decades of precedent for them in the music business. But at the time, it was the new project from the frontman for an alt-rock band called Tripping Daisy, which had a minor hit in the late ‘90s earlier with a song called “I Got A Girl.” I remembered “I Got A Girl” but didn’t really have strong feelings about it, and then the band never really had a second hit and I forgot about them, like most people seemed to. Then he started the Polyphonic Spree and it was kind of like… a band with the aesthetics of a cult, I guess? There were a shitload of them—a full vocal choir, plus a horn, string, and woodwind section to supplement the guitars and drums. There weren’t a lot of pop bands back in 2002 that had a full-time french horn player, anyway. It was visually striking, having twenty-plus people in robes, with symphonic instruments, playing these lovely, weird pop songs. There wasn’t a religious component to the band—the songs were all secular, maybe oriented very slightly toward calling out how neat the sun is?—but that just made it all more appealing to me. It was all the good parts of a cult without any of the bad, just this group of people in robes who didn’t ask you to believe anything or follow them in any way except to sing along.

“Soldier Girl” was the song that caught my ear first, built as it is around this collection of sounds that interact in a novel way—the opening is a single note played on the strings, leading to a full minute of instrumental interplay between the guitar and the string section, each taking turns playing a riff they each repeat over and over again a half dozen times, while everything else starts to arrive—a bass guitar, a theremin, a flute, all fluttering around in the background. And then the Tripping Daisy guy starts singing, delivering the first few words of the three (3) total lines that make up the lyrics to the entire song: “I’ve found my soldier girl / she’s so far away / she makes my head spin around.”

And then the song just erupts, this cacophony of joyful noise where all the instruments that were just teasing each other in the song’s introduction come crashing in together, while the full choir sing those lines six times, each one more explosive and bright-sounding than the last, nonsense lines that sounded to me like a vision for the way I wanted my life to feel.

I think “Soldier Girl” spoke to me so profoundly because I had spent so much time before I moved to Austin living inside my head. I’ve always done that—I never really learned how to feel my feelings, but I also am not the sort of person to bury them, so I taught myself how to think them, instead. I conceived of myself as a writer to give myself the tools I needed to do that, to move my fingers in a way that called forth lines and curves that somehow resembled actual thoughts and feelings. And that served me well, until it didn’t, and I got stuck in my own head in a way that was really hard for me to get out of. Moving to Austin was the first step toward changing that, because I needed the sort of hard-reset that a new place to live, new people around me, a new job and a new city could offer. And then “Soldier Girl,” as this bombastic explosion of noise that felt joyful and optimistic, performed by this band of absolute weirdos in big white hippie robes, singing words that don’t really mean anything but which feel big and brightly-colored and hopeful for the future, gave me a soundtrack for it. It sort of bypassed the thinking part of my brain, went underneath it and hit me in my spleen or, or, or my duodenum or something, where big feelings live, and then got them to spill out.

There have been lots of songs I’ve loved that articulated something I’d felt but never been able to express before. “Soldier Girl,” though, hit differently—it was a song about the way I aspired to feel, excited and yearning and impassioned and explosive. It sounded like being alive to me, at a time when I really needed another way to imagine what that could be like. Of course I never shut up about it.

My love affair with the Polyphonic Spree cooled over the next couple years; the band got a little bit famous (they’re on an episode of Scrubs for some reason?), which maybe made them feel a little bit less like mine, and, with a few exceptions, the songs didn’t hit quite the same way. I think that’s ultimately because what I really loved about “Soldier Girl” was that it felt like it was the soundtrack to how I wanted to change as a person, and once you change, you’re different. Some things, you only need to happen once.