She Says It’s All Right 3 comments

By Joel Hartse

One exciting thing about loving the music of the 1990s is that my favorite bands keep getting back together. They disappear for a while, bewildered by the new pop landscape from which MTV, CDs, and super-thick, chorus-heavy, distorted guitars have gone, and then re-emerge on the other side of the century, fresh-faced and ready to go with, say, a series of download-only EPs, like the Rentals just did. (See my review of that project here.)

I first heard of the Rentals, a band led by former Weezer bassist Matt Sharp, from Candi, a beautiful girl with long, curly brown hair, who smelled great and whose skin sparkled.

“I think you’d really like the Rentals, Joel,” she said to me when we ran into each other in the halls of the Catholic high school we both attended. She often said things like this, apropos of nothing. One day, she also recommended the punk band NOFX (which didn’t take, for me). Another, she mentioned she was thinking about becoming a lesbian (which also didn’t take, for her).

It took me a while, but eventually I came back to the Rentals on my own when I joined a friend’s rock band. They had decided to cover a number of Weezer songs. I was vaguely aware of Weezer, having heard “Undone (The Sweater Song)” at church camp some years hence, but didn’t know their songs and decided I had better buy some of their albums if I was going to play Sharp’s basslines.

Sharp was the bass player for Weezer for their first two (and only truly great) records, which I played over and over, learning the bass part and falsetto vocals to “Say It Ain’t So,” attempting to shred the solo on “In the Garage” on my acoustic guitar, putting on headphones and playing the drums along to the entirety of Pinkerton. Soon enough, obsessive teenage male completeism set in, and I picked up the two Rentals records, the one Sharp had made while he was still in Weezer and the one right after he quit. They are both moving portraits of love, loss, and nostalgia against an impossibly beautiful backdrop of synthesizers, violins, and women’s harmonies singing with Sharp’s raspy, knowing lead.

I was in love.

I was never love with Candi, I don’t think. The only time we even spent time together outside of school was a punk rock concert at a local theater. We drove to the show, sat through four pretty horrible pop-punk bands, and headed back to the car. It took me about six years to realize retroactively that this had been a date, that she had gotten dressed up for the occasion, that she was maybe more interested in spending time with me than seeing Goldfinger. As usual, I was too engrossed in the music to realize this.

I don’t know where Candi ended up. I remembered her, though, years later when I was listening to the Rentals and I heard the song “She Says It’s All Right,” which I’d heard dozens of times before. This catchy little pop tune from the band’s second album, Seven More Minutes, suddenly seemed almost unbearably sad to me.

She says it's all right that you don't speak the language
I know that you barely try
I love The Smiths and my cigarettes, and I like you in my bed
But I don't need you to get by

It was the ambivalence that struck me; a kind of banal terror in the gentle beauty of a song celebrating mediocrity. It was about a love that would never really matter one way or the other, that wasn't about passionate last-minute goodbye kisses nor shouted arguments and clothing tossed from third-story windows, or even serious talks about whether there would be a baby or where to spend Christmas. “She Says It’s All Right” is about a relationship that will never be more than a stopgap, a way to simply not feel quite so alone for a while, the need for a warm body.

She says it's all right you're going to the States
and you won't be back for awhile
She says it's all right with you, it's all right without you
Either way is just fine

All over the world, I know, there are couplings of convenience, people who do not put their whole minds and hearts and bodies into love, people who are always on the lookout for something else, and that everywhere and at all times, someone is careless with love.

I try hard not to be, but I also know how quickly my homecoming from a conference trip to Arizona last week quickly became an argument about doing the dishes, because marriage is not a breezy pop ditty. She doesn’t say it’s all right, and neither do I. Instead, we fight (I hope) to turn love into, as another of my favorite pop bands, Mates of State, puts it, “something static and solemnly invincible.” Carelessness is out.

I know that Candi and I were careless with whatever we had, but that the carelessness of our youth was a strength. We didn’t care about much, we were hanging out at a punk rock show because we had nobody else to go with, and had a good time. The Rentals were kind of the same—a group of whatever musicians happened to be around Sharp, coming and going, breaking up after a few obscure records.

But they are back together now, trying again, and maybe this time they will get somewhere with these new recordings. Whether they achieve a modicum of fame and prestige among the indie-hipster set, or create something of lasting beauty, remains to be seen.

What I know is that they’ll make that music that tugs at my heartstrings, filled to the brim with a recklessness that works so well in bittersweet pop songs and so rarely in real life.