Same Things

One imagines Doug Gillard sitting on his couch, picking out a figure on his acoustic guitar, liking what he hears and rolling tape. He adds a little keyboard, a bass line and then decides he has the makings of a song. Some electric guitar creates a space for a chorus, while a guitar plucked so rapidly that it sounds a bit like a mandolin creates a sort of bridge/chorus hybrid. Then he passes the tape to Robert Pollard.

It's a short track, just 1:19, but Pollard is able to improve upon it, offering two concise verses that, through some heavy reverb perfectly echo the music's dark tone. He doesn't say much, but drops a couplet worthy of enshrinement in the RP hall of fame:

That’s the way the eyecrust crumbles
the everlasting holyman stumbles

And with that, it's done, a small slice greater than the sum of its parts.

Port Authority

With most of Robert Pollard's collaborative projects, it's easy to hear other ways the melody could go. Pollard's knack for finding something other than the obvious is one of his great charms, and it makes otherwise pedestrian songs from collaborators who send him tapes of instrumental backing tracks come alive.

But sometimes he misses. That seems to be the case with "Port Authority," a subdued track from Pollard's Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department collaboration with latter-day Guided by Voices guitarist Doug Gillard. Here, Gillard offers a quietly played guitar figure with slight bleeps and bloops running beneath it in spots. About halfway in he strums a few staccato chords and adds minimal drums to drive the song forward. All this time, Pollard sings a simpatico lyric about the song of the south, apes and tailors and miracle girls. He sings two verses before the change in dynamic and one after it, but the only difference is that Pollard projects a bit more to mirror what Gillard is doing.

The result is all tension and no release. The song seems to cry out for a chorus, or at least something different as the song shifts. Instead, one imagines Pollard sitting back, taking in Gillard's new tone and waiting for his moment, only to hear the song fade out before he finds it. It's an oddly unsatisfying track because of it. There are pretty moments early on, and it's not as if there's nothing of merit here. But one wonders about what might have been. It feels like a missed opportunity.