Hooks to Hang a Hat On

Spider Bags - A Celebration of Hunger

“I’ve got a bad complexion and a lot to say” is how Dan McGee opens one of my favorite recent albums, and it’s absolutely true. He writes like a guy with really nothing to lose, and he shoots from the hip.

This opening track sets a lot of the tones in the album, as catchy licks and cheeky lines about John Denver’s sex problems give us a clear indication of the free-flowing open-heartedness of the music to come. As the album continues, we hear the strong country influence that the human brain seems to already commit to the moans of a jaded and battered individual. This isn’t Toby Keith complaining about nothing whilst filling his ten-gallon hat with wads of swindled hundreds, this is the real spirit of country music. This is about pain and death and love and drug-binges. This is this man’s life, for better or worse.

Most of the songs are sweet little southern jams, complete with twangy leads and smatterings of keyboard, set to endearing drum beats but flush with the rock and roll influence that so many modern musicians can’t escape. The rhythms hit hard and the hooks stay with you for days. They’re drunken sing-alongs, songs just for fuck’s sake, and dark stills of a distant love in the shadow of a shadowy past.

McGee writes in a way that the listener could never bring himself to doubt. The sixth track, “So Long a Rope”, seems to be about a man’s quiet observations as he’s about to hang himself. “You and me by the cutest tree / On the lawn where I grew up”, he recalls, “So long a rope for such a short distance / Or, at best, a short rope for a long stretch.” Beautiful depictions of ominous trouble, the idea that things aren’t always going to be alright. He shows us a man who’s survived against all odds and now has the burden of asking the “what now?”

It’s the overwhelming question in his life, and he pushes this motif further in “Alphabet City Blues” with an altered Prufrock reference, “So let us go then, you and I / When the evening sky is fallen / The night is dark like you and I”. The question, we see, has no answer, and he’s forced to recount his hazy gone life ad infinitum.

And so the album ends on the only note it could: “My oh my, what a quarrel I’m in.” We’re back to where we started, no worse for wear, and if nothing else with the feeling of company we get from the choruses we’ll be whistling for the rest of the night. Good times.

-Drew