When She Turns 50

"When She Turns 50" is another of Robert Pollard's drinking songs, offering an oddball vignette of a night at the bar. "The tavern's open again," he sings. "The line-up who light up will surely decide the fate of these incorrigibles who plaster their messages up on the interstate."

Sounds like an inside joke to me; if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the drunks at the bar were talking about kids who spraypaint graffiti on overpasses.

At some point, a young woman seems to enter the picture, with an older drinker stating/lamenting, "When she turns 50, I might be dead."

The second and final verse is more cryptic still, though it likely reverts to a third-person look a the person singing the chorus. "Go singing his songs about rush-hour traffic jams," Pollard sings, "When the vodka kicks in. A night at the Rockies, digging in for the slam." "Rockies" and "slam" makes me think of Colorado's baseball team, though the team wasn't established until three years after this album was released.

To keep the strangeness of the song alive, Pollard ends with a variation of the chorus: "When she turn 50, I'll bake the bread." Huh?