Hearts of Oak, Nate

I had intended to go long on this album but the short week got away from me, so instead of my usual pontification, you get a bunch of autobiographical bullet points. Somewhere, Joe is smiling at how far I have fallen.

• Started listening to Ted Leo in 2005, "Little Dawn" was the on-ramp. For about the next five years, his shit remained at the top of my "Most Played" iTunes list.
  
  
• In this period, I probably saw Ted Leo live about twelve times, including a rip-shit set at Lollapalooza and a semi-disastrous set at the First Unitarian Church.
  
  
• Ted Leo does not have a perfect, front-to-back masterpiece in his catalog, but his greatest hits hold up against anyone else's in the world of poppy, smart, hooky guitar rock.
  
  
• Hearts of Oak contains several of those greatest hits, listed here in increasing order of radness: "The Crane Takes Flight," "I'm a Ghost," "Ballad of the Sin Eater," "The High Party," "Bridges, Squares," "Hearts of Oak," "Where Have All The Rude Boys Gone?"
  
  
• Ultimately, what makes Leo such a satisfying listen—and the kind of artist a dude can age with—is how many dimensions he provides for engagement. Do you just want to rock, baby? Here is "Hearts of Oak," with its earworm riff and its killer little solo and its caffeinated drum. Do you want something a little more dynamic? Here is the hip-shaking "Ballad of the Sin Eater," here is the celtic pride of "The Crane Takes Flight." Do you want to sink deeper into the lyrics and melodies? Here is the layering of "Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?", here are the shadow hooks of "The High Party" and "Bridges, Squares." Want to go even deeper and recognize that these are all essays about war and jingoism in the era of post-9/11 terror of terror? Here's the whole fucking album, trojan horse that it is, pol-sci for morons.
  
  
• That last paragraph is basically the "galaxy brain" meme.
  
  
• Ted Leo is what people think Elvis Costello is. I will not explain this take.
  
  
• I would, at pretty much any point in my life between 2005 and 2016, have happily traded two of my five senses to be able to play guitar like Leo does.
  
  
• I find it very hard to write about the albums that I care about, the ones that have great personal meaning to me. All my usual tricks betray me. All my sentences evaporate. The best I can usually do is just point at my stereo and say "Don't you hear this shit? Don't you hear what's going on here?"
  
  
• Hearts of Oak isn't exactly that, but it's close enough that this is what you get.
  
  
• There were girls at these Ted Leo shows, by the way. I did not usually attend shows with a lot of non-dudes at them. Even when I saw Leo back in February of this year, it was a decidedly non-specifically-dudely crowd. That is worth something, but I don't care to explain what.
  
  
• "And when I say me, I mean my brain. And when I say give me the cure, I mean to kill the pain. And when I say kill the pain, I mean to get the devil out. And when I say devil, I mean the manifestation of doubt." No fucking clue if this actually profound, but I have been muttering this to myself like a prayer for nearly seventeen years. Probably says more about me than it does Ted, but slouches don't do that to people.