Intro

I have an iTunes playlist with about 600 Robert Pollard-related songs that I usually spin through when looking for something to write about here. Because I keep the playlist ordered in alphabetical order by band name, the first song that always pops up is "Intro" from Airport 5's Life Starts Here. I usually skip past it without listening, but today I decided to pay attention.

After today, I'll probably go back to skipping it. It's a fine, short way to start that album, but there's little to latch onto that would make me seek it out. It begins with Tobin Sprout pounding away on a piano figure that makes "Chopsticks" sound adventurous, with Pollard singing over top. There is a bit of percussion that sounds like someone tapping a tabletop, and that's it. Save for the fact that this 1:04 song is split in two parts, with Sprout's music seemingly looped once, there isn't much here.

Pollard's lyric, in it's entirety:

"Making a wish/ and your wishes are here/ and your words are herded/ into proper grids"
"Measured out/ to roam about/ together, birds of a feather/ ride them, the good ones - oh, yes."

Natives Approach Our Plane

Robert Pollard has toyed with speak-singing several times over his career, and "Natives Approach Our Plane" is one example of its limitations. Tobin Sprout offers a repetitive riff here, one that seems ready for either an adventurous Pollard melody that takes off and heads in strange directions, or something melodically and vocally that stays within the limited palette offered by the backing track. He chose the latter here.

While a multitracked Pollard chants "natives approach our plane," he sings in an echoed voice lines like "Strangers familiar in the funhouse mirror, they are us/ Ideal directions in the zero zone make me laugh."

It's a formula that would work better if the song were half as long, but at three minutes, it's simply too much. Pollard has done much more with similar material, but here seems to have locked into the rhythmic tone of the title phrase and won't let go.

The Dawntrust Guarantee

Tobin Sprout doesn't give Robert Pollard much to work with on this track, but Pollard finds a way to make it at least a bit interesting. Faced with a minimalist, electro-bleep track created by some strange guitar effects, he records a strange little one-minute poem with his voice treated in a way that makes it sound like a sort of "Danger, Will Robinson" robot. You won't find yourself deciding to cue this up much... or ever, really, but it's hard to imagine Pollard doing much more with it.

I sail the sink
For a severe several days
On the dawntrust guarantee
Hands strange criminals
Her growing religion
Gains gusto
Her growing hair
Is attractive
In the joint
On the wall
Trust me

However Young They Are

Tobin Sprout didn't give Robert Pollard much to work with on what became the song "However Young They Are." Sprout's part in the collaboration is minimalist: a quiet drum machine beat, a strummed acoustic guitar and some barely there keyboard washes (shades of Todd Tobias there). Pollard took to the challenge with gusto, creating a melody that finds the subtle hooks in Sprout's recording, enhancing it in every way.

Pollard sings -- or rather, implores -- the listener: "And lead your people, however young they are." Who is the leader? Who are these young people? He doesn't say. Whatever the story here, it's a recent development. He intones in a voiceover toward the end of the track, sounding like Michael Stipe in R.E.M.'s "Belong,"

The wait is over
Prior to this blessed event
We felt nothing
Now we are clearheaded
And able to see in the dark

With the drum-machine handclaps in Sprout's beat, I imagine legions of young people, marching toward some unnamed inevitable, clapping in unison while Pollard leads them on. If nothing else, I just wrote a treatment for a video for the song. Paging Steven Soderbergh...

Yellow Wife No. 5

The Airport 5 project showed just how much Guided by Voices lost with the exit of Tobin Sprout after the Under the Bushes, Under the Stars album. Robert Pollard is fully capable of writing an album's worth of great songs, but Sprout's tunes -- consider him the George Harrison to Pollard's Lennon and McCartney (or given the relative output, maybe the Ringo Starr to Pollard's Lennon, McCartney and Harrison) -- always offered just enough change of pace to keep things interesting.

While all of GBV's post-Sprout discs was great in its own way, it would be hard to argue that each couldn't have been improved by the inclusion of a Sprout-penned tune or two. Need proof? Cue up Life Starts Here or Tower in the Fountain of Sparks. Even more than Sprout's solo discs, which each contained a gem or two that could have helped the contemporaneous GBV discs, these collaborative efforts with Robert Pollard showed that the two musicians worked well together, and that Sprout's creative flashes brought out something in Pollard that no one else could. Doug Gillard played a similar part in latter-day GBV, but for the most part he seemed to unleash the latent hard rocker in his boss. Sprout, in contrast, freed some of Pollard's most delicate and memorable melodies.

"Yellow Wife No. 5" isn't the strongest track on Life Starts Here, but it is a keeper. Over one of Sprout's trademark echo-laden arpeggiated guitar figures, Pollard intones the verses, with references to hot boxes and zip codes, "white crushed Americans" and Fort Recovery, a small historic village on the border between Indiana and Ohio just an hours drive from his native Dayton. Then comes the chorus. The music doesn't change, but Pollard digs out the harmonic potential in Sprout's songbed, finding a great melody with which to sing a simple, impenetrable couplet: "Save yourself, stay alive, with Yellow Wife no. 5." Is it a drug? A dye? An actual yellow wife, fifth in the series? As always, it doesn't matter.