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?

The Hard Way

It seems as if there should be a point in Guided by Voices' discography where the quirky, R.E.M.-influenced songs of Robert Pollard's early years would give way to the more muscular, arena-ready rock of GBV v. X.0, but songs like "The Hard Way" show no such clear delineation exists. Plug this song into the latter-day GBV lineup's live show, and you'd get something that could rock toe-to-toe with anything on the band's last few albums. Pollard even rips through an abbreviated guitar solo that Doug Gillard might not be ashamed to call his own.

What the song also makes clear is that Pollard, who's early songs tend toward the moon-June proclamations of love (OK, this is an over-generalization, but if you take the whole of his output, his early stuff is his most typical and pedestrian), could obfuscate like a pro very early on. What is this song about? Who can say? I get a Moby Dick vibe here as he sings about a "whale out of water" and "a bone on a string," but there's more going on here, some larger metaphor I can't quite grasp. Whatever it is, it's compelling, his lines about "weak feet and tired arms - watch them flail, cold and pale, the hard way," sounding almost chilling.

The last verse and the bridge contain some of Pollard's best lyrics up to that point, almost cinematic in scope:

And so we drown in the animal sea
The factory of human pride
The place where I was born
The place where my father died
Last but not least there's an army
marching like stoned ghosts in hell
into the wishing well - the hard way
Doin' everything the hard way