The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: Elizabeth Elmore
May 2002
Elizabeth Elmore's late 1990s band Sarge was like its songs—moving fast, burning up the ground they left behind. The Champaign, Illinois, quartet put out Charcoal, The Glass Intact, and Distant—the last a record not distinguished by a version of "These Boots are Made for Walking," and Elmore, whose pictures on her albums always seemed to show her hiding behind bottles, went off to law school at Northwestern. Sarge was punk with a small voice and a backward glance, with less attitude and more follow-through than almost anyone they might have shared a stage with, but you had to figure Elmore had gone on to real life. Or something.
Elmore's new band the Reputation—Elmore, guitar and keyboards, Joel Root, bass, Sean Hulet, guitar, and changing drummers (currently Matt Espy)—moves even faster than Sarge. The speed is all inside the music; the band's push isn't all in its tempos. But instead of the hurry Sarge put into "Chicago" in 1996 or "Fast Girls" in 1998, where the feeling was that the story would evaporate in horror or pleasure if the singer didn't get it out quickly enough, on The Reputation (Initial Records) speed gives off the sense that the songs are chasing the singer, that if she doesn't move fast enough she'll never get out of them.
With Elmore's fierce rhythm-as-lead guitar shifting the music like a gearbox, the sound goes by so swiftly it's a small shock when anything sticks out. Often it's a word, a "fucked with" or a "slut," an "ass" or a "bitch," that seems less to rise up from a song's pulse than to drop down below it—a word that's sung more fully, with more rounding, than any word near it, as if inside the song it's a stop sign the band can't stop for. And it's no accident what words work like this.
The music is full of play—the whining horns on "She Turned Your Head ...," a rumbling kickoff for "The Truth" that's straight out of Elvis Presley's "(You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care"—and drenched in abjection. In Elmore's songs, the person singing is standing across the street looking into an old boyfriend's apartment window—or simply at people a few years younger, or just stupider, than she is now, living the life she used to live.
There is no nostalgia in Elmore's voice for getting completely ruined. For sleeping with the wrong people. For sleeping with the same wrong people again. For getting drunk every night. For picking up scars that heal on the surface but never stop itching. But there's no older-but-wiser knowledge, either. You can't put your arms around a memory, as I heard Ronnie Spector sing so passionately on the radio the other day. Elmore's new songs seem to say, You can't put your arms around a memory, but a memory can put its arms around you.
As the singer sees herself climbing the apartment steps that someone else is climbing now, or hustling down the same college-town streets that kids discovering bad living are filling up tonight, what sickens her is not that she used to be the people she's watching, but that she hasn't become anybody else. She knows better, but that's all she knows—or at 25, 26, 27, she just doesn't have the stamina to do it anymore.
Song by song on The Reputation, the music takes you down, shutting one door after another, until you resign yourself to the singer living her own life twice, like Frank Sinatra going back to dope in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)—which means her humiliation in the next song will be that much worse. But oddly, with the music seeming to end right there, after a long silence, a voice that's been submerged in its own past comes up for air.
Elmore takes up Elvis Costello's "Almost Blue"—a song that not only has Costello sung, Chet Baker sang—and seduces it. That's the only way I can put it: She makes the song cheat on its old boyfriends. "There's a boy here and he's almost you," she sings, right at the beginning, and the twists and curls she puts into "almost" make the melismatics of neo-soul—never mind if it's Alicia Keys or Destiny's Child—feel as subtle as wrestling holds. The song opens up, and you can't credit where you've been—just as when you go back to the beginning of The Reputation, you'll forget how it ends.
Originally published in Interview Magazine, May 2002