And I play "couldn't-be-much-boreder"

Shudder to Think - Corner of My Eye



A couple of months ago this movie came out, called "Control" that was about the band Joy Division and specifically their singer, Ian Curtis. A few years ago, I read the book that "Control" is based on, called Touching From a Distance. It was written by Deborah Curtis, who was married to the singer. They even had a daughter. The book, um, debased me of a mythology that I had carried about Curtis since I was a teenager - that he committed suicide by hanging himself in an empty room, leaving a mystery for the authorities. They eventually figured out that he stood atop a block of ice to place the noose around his neck, which he knew would melt and leave no trace before they found his body. Anyway, it's not at all true, although it is true that they found a copy of Iggy Pop's The Idiot on the turntable beside him.

Beyond movies, the internet is doing a good job of removing all of these weird legends that we carry about our favorites - like how Debbie Harry wasn't actually almost abducted by Ted Bundy, or how Sinbad didn't die last year, or how Lars Ulrich isn't HIV-positive. But it sometimes feels like a fun robber.

Anyway, when I first heard Shudder to Think it was this song on a mixed tape, and the friend who made it for me said that the singer had trained for the opera before getting into punk, which is why he sang so uniquely. I resisted his voice for awhile; the leaps in pitch, the near-constant vibrato and smoothed-out vowels sounding so much like good posture and all the other stuff I joined punk to avoid. But I really liked the way he sang "and I just want to see my girlfriend, cause her hugs are the best I know", because his inflection actually adds to the emotion of the line, makes it believable and bright in a way that Blake Schwarzenbach or Billie Joe wouldn't have been able to. That scratch of ache that I felt so deeply when I first heard it and feel again on a night like tonight was enough to carry me through the song over and over and over again. I liked the poetry of his lyrics, it was sweetly teenaged and facile, full of images like "housefly hair" and alcohol described as "forgetting sauce", the types of conceits that never appeared in the underground where everyone simply said what they meant. "At least I can fucking think" and "if I started crying, would you start crying?" and "put your hand in my hand and look me in the eye when you're talking to me" are all potent, but they sometimes fade and stop registering with their directness. While I still think about Shudder to Think's "neurotic time" when I'm on the subway.

The song itself is another kind of magic, a take on the sound of their friends that's just skewed enough to sound unlike everything else. On the Dischord Records biography of Shudder to Think they describe the band as being "inspired by, but also independent from" the Dischord scene. I like the way they take the insistent, melodic guitars of Revolution Summer and slowed them down just a touch, releasing a bit of the tension but creating some kind of nobleness that matches the singer's tone. As the verse begins, there's a chugga-chugga guitar riff that would feel muscular and heavy-browed in another band's hands, but in "Corner of My Eye" feels pensive and wide-eyed in the way the lyrics feel.

The thing is that there are a million punk songs about feeling isolated in a crowd, about the weight of the mainstream, the pressure of their lifestyles. And there's something great about kicking out, and spitting and causing a scene like the songs do, but most of the time I just feel tense and so quiet and wishing I could shrink or vanish. And more than anything, I watch: the secret interactions of the people around me, the way they hold their bags, the way they care about other people's gazes or else the way they make a show of not caring. But I never found a song that said that until "Corner of My Eye." And I just spent an hour reading every bio I could of Shudder to Think's singer Craig Wedren and I can't find a single reference to him training for the opera. And I'm annoyed to have to let go of another amazing myth but I feel even better coming to terms with the brilliant cohesion of the entire band, with the way their every gesture reinforces this sense of movement surrounding me and forcing me more and more inward, wishing for faraway hugs and wondering about the lives of the people across me on the train.