Listen Up: Mending A Heart With What Broke It (Or, I Love The Everybodyfields, Vol. 392)

It's been six months since the split.

I've written so much about The Everybodyfields that it's become an office joke, so much that even now―six months after they stopped being a band, six months after I wrote what I figured would be the last thing I ever wrote about them―it feels a bit like overkill.

But the anatomy of a band breakup is a curious thing, and especially compelling for anyone moderately infatuated with the strange intertangled forces of music and memory. My first, back in high school, hit me pretty hard—I felt like everyone in the band would all just disappear into the aether, like the records might no longer play, like the songs' fingerprints would eventually wear completely off my cerebral cortex if the band who made them weren't around to keep them alive. They were gone. It was over. My life was going to end.

That didn't happen, of course. And by the time The Everybodyfields called it quits that afternoon this June with an official announcement on their website, I was so far removed from my fifteen-year-old self in so many ways that I was shocked to the core not exactly by the announcement itself―I'd kinda seen it coming―but by how familiar my reaction felt, how the sad panic that crept through my arms that day felt just like it had eight and a half years before on whatever fall afternoon I'd read about Ben Folds Five. They were gone. It was over. My life was going to end.

And once again, that didn't happen, of course. Instead, I typed up some semblance of an obituary and closed my laptop and packed up my car and drove 120 miles north to my parents' house, to Chattanooga, where five years ago my mom and dad had been at a market downtown and heard these kids playing and my dad said, "Gosh, that sounds just like Gram Parsons," and bought the CD and brought it home to me and I said, "The Everybodyfields? That's a funny name."

Of all the hours I've spent in the car over the last few years, too many of those hours to count had been soundtracked by The Everybodyfields. It was my default music for nearly every drive; there were times―days, weeks―where it was all I really wanted to hear. But that Friday, I don't remember what I played. I don't remember if it was them or someone else. It could have easily been them on that afternoon, but any later and it fell squarely into the several-month period where I couldn't bear to hear even three notes of any of their songs, those songs that are so deep-down sad even in the very best of times but with the raw scrape of the split still healing on my heart were just too much to bear.

I don't remember if I listened to them on the drive last night, but I do remember that I cried. I'd seen it coming, but my heart still broke.

The last few times I'd seen them live―one of the five times I saw them play in the latter half of 2008, which felt a little ridiculous even at the time but which I absolutely no longer regret―I sensed some kind of wedge driving between Sam Quinn and Jill Andrews, the band's core duo and main songwriters. They'd almost always written their own individual songs, going boy-girl-boy-girl on all the albums, each one twisting and turning their high lonesome country influences in their own certain way. But the new songs they'd been playing were different in new ways, big ways. Jill's songs were more direct, studied, pointed, with a fierce emotional clarity that had always been there but never yet burned so strong. And Sam's songs were suddenly so wide-eyed and desperate, haunted and sprawling loose and wild like I'd never heard before.

When they played the Paste offices last November, the difference between their songs felt abrupt and plain. They were all performed by the same band, sung in the same voices and with the same glorious, aching harmonies, but every time Jill and Sam traded their acoustic guitar back and forth across our tiny stage, it swung in the air between them as if across some great and growing abyss.

Most likely, the songs weren't the thing but more a symptom of the thing, whatever that thing was that pushed them to decide to not make music together anymore. I can't fairly presume to know what that thing was—all I know is: They are gone. It is over. And our lives are going on.

I saw Jill play a solo show at Eddie's Attic last Thursday night. She's got an EP out now, and it's just great. Half of the six songs I already knew from those final few shows last year, and one in particular was on track to becoming my new favorite Everybodyfields song. It's called "Worth Keeping" and she, with her new band, played it Thursday night. My favorite part is the introduction, which starts off with just a little strumming and her singing; she's always been good at writing lines that catch you unawares, delivered so beautifully as to hide, at first, their curdling bile, their cutting scorn—but this one really gets me. "Say you're tired, say you're busy / You can lie to me, it should come easy / For you have been doing it for a while / You have been doing it for a while," she sings, her voice dropping down on the last word, heavy with―what? You think she's resigning herself to something in that moment but then comes the real song, the whole band easing in as she demands, "Take your hands out of your pockets and hold me."

I don't know who she wrote this song about, but I know that feeling now, not from any specific personal interactions with anyone in my own life―band breakups seem to be the only kind of breakups I've ever really had―but from these six months that have just passed, spent waiting and wondering what would become of this band now. That feeling of wanting to be seen, to be known, to be held and reassured―that's all I wanted from these songs, and for a while it was all I couldn't get from them. What do you do when something you so rely on for comfort and stability, like a rock―even if, in this case, it was a kind of sad rock―is suddenly in painful flux itself?

You keep holding on, is what you do. You wait it out. And if you've got something good, then it's worth it.

And so far, it seems to have been worth it. Jill's show Thursday was an absolute delight, her band―a new guitarist, bass player and drummer, plus Everybodyfields' keyboardist Josh Oliver―joking and giggling between songs, delivering each one of her gently piercing little masterpieces with energy and grace. She was beaming, her voice as rich and steady as ever, her hair longer and her dress shorter than the last few times I'd seen her play with the old band. There was a lightness to the set that I never felt at an Everybodyfields show, an air of freshness, of things having been sloughed off and left along the wayside since the end of last year. Her new songs could easily be Everybodyfields songs and the old songs she played could easily have always been just her own if not for the insistence of my own ears to interlay Sam's voice at just the moment he would have leaned into the mic with a plaintive, warbling harmony.

I haven't seen Sam and his new band play yet―they were supposed to be at Eddie's just a few nights before Jill, but cancelled. (Oliver is in that band, as well—guess they got joint custody of him in the split.) Sam will have an album out sometime next year that I'm holding on for, too. He was always the more unpredictable half, but with a real darkly pleasing weirdness that exists in only the faintest flickers in Jill, so I'm less sure of what we'll see from him. But I can't wait to hold both their records in my hands at once, weigh them evenly in my palms, and try to parse out how I've wound up with twice the beautiful music I would have had if they'd stayed together―try to cobble together what a vision of their future apart looks like.

Despite myself, I think it might look pretty alright.

Watch an update video and a performance of a few new songs from Jill Andrews:

Watch Sam Quinn + Japan Ten perform a new song, "Hello":