Hearts of Oak, Joe

You could describe Hearts of Oak with many adjectives, but the one I keep coming back to is: haunted.

There are the obvious warning signs, of course. "Dead Voices" is about how those we have lost still echo through to the present. "Tell Balgeary, Balgury Is Dead" is based on an old Irish folk tale about death and cats(?). "I'm a Ghost," if taken literally, is about Ted Leo as a ghost (even though Leo has stated that it is figuratively about "alienation from the political process," which is its own kind of horror).

The more I sat with Hearts of Oak, the more creeped out I got. I got sadder, too. It started to feel like a funeral. Which is an insane thing to say about a Ted Leo album! We have rarely, if ever, covered an album in Record Club with this many hits, this much power pop, this much upbeat mania via a rock 'n' roll band. On its surface, this is a distinctly happy album. Dig a little deeper, and you start to see how melancholy this motherfucker truly is.

A sense of loss pervades the album. "Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?" sets the tone right from the beginning. It is a buoyant ode to second wave ska bands, yes, but it is also an intensely sad ode to something that will never be again. I won't pretend to know all the references to the Specials or whatever, but I feel what lies underneath the catchy chorus: the grief, the nostalgia, the longing.

 

Maybe this is a choice, to view Hearts of Oak in this way, but it's a choice I couldn't help but make this week. Take something like "The Anointed One." Interesting backstory on this one. The titular "One" is an old friend of Ted Leo from college. After graduation, this guy went on to become a Republican representative. The song eventually evolves into a guitar banger, but there's so much fucking anguish too. It's that loss when you think you know a friend, but they turn out to be someone completely different. There's a sense of loss of someone that you thought you used to know. A friend is dead, and that hurts. 

Of course, this being an album from early 2003, the specter of 9/11 hangs over these proceedings. I know, I know, kinda cliché, but true. It's as true as the fact that every album released from 2021-2023 will have the specter of COVID hanging over it in the same way. I don't believe there is anything specifically references September 11th on this album, but it's there anyway. It's there is the left-wing politics, the vague anti-Bush sentiments, the general sense that our country is in decay—a sense that carries over from 2003 to 2022 for sure.

It should probably go without saying that I was not listening to Ted Leo in 2003, seeing as how I wasn't really listening to anything in 2003, at least not in the way I listen to music now. It took me years to even hear the name—probably recommended from someone in the dank Collegian office—and even then, I wasn't sold. Shake the Sheets was my introduction, and it's fine. I also had the "Since U Been Gone" cover on my iPod up until I got annoyed with it last year and took it off. I listened to The Both on a recommendation a few years ago, and really like it, but I kinda figured that was more because of Aimee Mann than Ted Leo.

I guess my point here is that, because I am now enthralled with Hearts of Oak, and have gotten really into it, now I'd be doing my own grieving. Why did it take me so long to connect with this music? Why couldn't I do it in college? What countless memories have been lost because of my irresponsible waiting?

Those are questions I'd typically be asking in these scenarios, when Record Club presents an album I should've listened to in my youth but didn't. What I'm proposing now, at least for this specific album at this specific time, is that those questions can be easily answered. Why didn't I listen to Hearts of Oak in 2003 or 2008 or 2015, even though I have always loved music that sounds like this? Because I wasn't ready. I was too young, too green, too immature to appreciate what lies at the heart of this thing.

It would've been hard to see the sadness. I would've liked it in a two-dimensional way—I like rock 'n' roll, I like loud and fast songs, I like hooks—but I would've failed to see that Hearts of Oak is really an album with one thousand dimensions. Hearts of Oak is about loss, and is completed haunted by that loss. I'm saying that, in order to appreciate Hearts of Oak, you need to have lost something yourself. Could be another person, could be a moment in time, could be a part of yourself. But the loss is essential. Only in that context can this Ted Leo album flourish.

 

I think about what Ted Leo himself has lost. Really, the skeleton key for this album was a 2017 interview with Leo on Stereogum. It's probably one of the most honest and heart-wrenching music interviews I've ever read. Many losses are documented. There's the loss of a successful career (mid-'00s indie rock star fallen on hard times, lost enough to find himself playing a private gig for some rich douche with a shrimp cocktail). There's the loss of a home (priced out of New York, having to admit that his chosen artform can't even pay the rent). There's the loss of his daughter, and the loss of the possibility of parenthood. There's even a loss of innocence, in the memories of childhood traumas that bubbled to the surface during Leo's lowest days. Even five years after the interview, even after a relatively successful (creatively, if not financially) comeback solo record, and I'm still gutted.

 

Now, all of that gut-wrenching stuff was fourteen years away from Ted Leo by the time he released Hearts of Oak, but as I found out this week, ghosts are not beholden to concepts like time. That such hard times have befallen one of the nicest and most respected dudes in indie rock makes his ostensible high point all the more bittersweet. Hearts of Oak itself becomes the ghost, hovering over the wreckage that now lay before us, almost two decades after it was born into the world. All that time, passing through your fingers like water.

I had a weird week, emotionally—as if you couldn't already tell that by the fact that I'm sitting here writing about death and loss and grief regarding one of the most upbeat and fun albums I've maybe ever heard—but that's okay. Weeks like this happen. And, like, it's not even like anything actually happened. I just felt this weird intangible loss hovering around me. It was more like feeling unmoored than feeling depressed, ya know?

I'm having trouble explaining it, but that's okay, because here was Ted Leo, able to translate. I don't think it was a matter of him speaking for me, but maybe a matter of me speaking for him, for it, the album. It may not have been intended to be a haunted album. On the surface, it's as enthusiastically joyous an album as you're likely to find anywhere. But it spoke to me on a different wavelength. That intangible feeling of loss that haunted me this week was made tangible in Hearts of Oak.

It didn't make me sadder. It didn't make me happier either. I'm not even talking about emotions here. I'm talking about something deeper than that. Something I can't even begin to describe. Why would I even try when I can just push play again?

GRADE: 4.5 pukes out of 5