Listen Up: Arcade Fire, Lissie and the Scourge of Expectations

Loving music is a very weird thing. Hating it is, too. And so is that rare, but still very peculiar, reaction of non-reaction. But maybe the strangest of all the strange feelings that music can provoke is the very distinct, often sad one of absolute and utter disappointment.

Like all reactions to music, it has at least as much to do with the person who’s experiencing the disappointment as it does with the music doing the disappointing—taste is personal, we know, but so is distaste, and both have quite a lot to do with the odd, ongoing dance between expectations and perceived reality. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately through the lens of two recent new-music releases: Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs, an album that I do not like, and Lissie’s Catching a Tiger, an album that I like quite a lot. In both cases, most of the discussion about the albums online and out in the world are really more conversations about expectations—how to hold them to the presumed promise of their previous works, how to reconcile their work with our needs and desires as listeners, how generally to discern their quality when they seem to be altering so much of what once seemed like their basic idioms.

What Arcade Fire did with its first two albums, Funeral and Neon Bible, whether they meant to or not, was become a band that many people loved for its anthems, its soaring choruses, its life-affirming bombast, the kind of music that punches you right in the gut and feels like it lives in your heart and under your skin—and that’s a big thing to mess with, to suddenly pull out from under fans, even if it’s never been the only interesting aspect of your music or the most important one. And so it was understandable, I think, that some people were really let down by The Suburbs. (Personally, I was more let down by the lack of engaging, non-cliched lyrics that didn’t make me totally cringe—such a low rung that I hardly considered a demand that Win Butler clear it to be an “expectation,” but if I had one, that was it.) But I also sympathize with the so many others who were frustrated by that perceived inability to accept the album for what it was, to consider it on its own terms, because there is sense of entitlement among so many music fans that they deserve a certain kind of album from the bands they love simply because they know them and love them and find them so deeply important in their lives, and this is a notion that alternately fascinates me and skeeves me out.

Not that everyone who felt disappointed by The Suburbs, or who has ever been disappointed by an artist before, was participating in this kind of thinking—but I think it happens a lot, and not just among the most devotedly fannish. I think it mostly comes from the fact that our relationships with our favorite bands and artists aren’t always recognized as relationships, but do often carry with them as much baggage and hang-ups and weirdness as actual real-life friendships and can sometimes be as tricky to navigate as we get older and our lives change and time moves onward. Fans consume and internalize everything an artist produces, everything that one creator found most important and worth sharing, and those sounds and ideas get transformed into daily mantras and personal anthems; we take it and use it however we want, however it best fits into our lives; we can make words mean things they don’t really mean, and no one can tell us that we’re right or wrong; we can turn all of our hopes and dreams and fears out onto one song, one album, one artist, and let them carry the load. That can make us stronger, to be sure, but it can also make us weaker—love always makes you vulnerable, perhaps never more than when you love something that was never yours to begin with, something that is not only still growing and changing but is actually completely unaware of you and how you feel. And so how unfair is it that we hold artists to these standards that they can’t possibly be aware of, let alone meet?

I would hate to write a song that ever meant anything to anyone, because then I would eventually have to write another one, probably, and it would be terrifying! I try to live up to various expectations every day of my life and alternately fail and succeed, so that’s not the issue. The issue is that people get crazy about music they love in a way that they don’t get crazy about other things. And I know no matter how great that first song was, the second might make someone sad—despondent, even—because I’d strayed from the glorious path they’d imagined for me in their mind and took some other less-good route instead and now they feel personally insulted because they had taken the time to love me and dream for me and imagine a happy future for us together but I ruined it because I wanted to do my own thing even though I never knew they had a thing that they wanted me to do because even though a person’s relationship with their favorite music is kind of like a real relationship with another person, it also is very different, in that it is largely one-sided and rooted in some weird emotional plane of existence where normal expectations and guiding interpersonal principals rarely apply.

I don’t know for sure but I imagine Lissie must have thought about this at least a little bit when she was making her full-length debut, Catching a Tiger, which came out last week. In my review for Paste I wrote a little bit about her career’s trajectory so far, and why the record might come as a surprise to some—better you read it here, but in short: the next great li’l folkie has gone and made herself a damn pop record, y’all. This album isn’t the anyone really expected her to make, I don’t think; it certainly isn’t the one I expected her to make. To be honest, the album I expected her to make (something more like a thirteen-track version of her Why You Runnin’ EP, reverb-y and twangy and sad and and sparsely beautiful, not so shiny, not so bright) was probably better than the album she did make. But, you know, I like the album she did make—I like it a lot. (And, to answer a concern raised in the comments on my review: This is not me convincing myself that this album is worthwhile after getting all hyped up about it for no reason. I am not skilled at, professionally interested in or temperamentally disposed to feigning interest in things that I actually find irredeemable. Regina Spektor is a notable victim of this shortcoming.) I can’t think of another album that I have had such high, specific expectations for, that so completely ignored those expectations and instead came strolling in with its own its own idea of itself, its own concept of who and what it should be, and so utterly convinced me that it was, indeed, the better of the two options.

And I think that’s because, for some reason, I really trust Lissie. I trust that she knows herself and the kind of music she wants to make enough that this record is not some unfortunate mutation of her as an artist, that she was not manipulated by the record’s producers or her collaborators, that she is not hungrily grabbing for any mainstream success at the cost of her artistic vision, that she did not compromise her voice for the sake of an album populated by numerous potential singles. Maybe that’s because, when I interviewed her last fall for a profile in the magazine, she came off as incredibly self-possessed, tough to push around, a really a singular sort of girl; maybe it’s because she’s on Fat Possum records, a small independent label whose motto is “We’re trying our best”; maybe it’s a bit of both. Or maybe I’m all wrong. But if I thought she was getting twisted and turned against her will for the sake of a hit record or broader appeal, it would likely be based on the same exact amount of evidence—whatever about her character I’d picked up from an interview, my limited knowledge of the how album-making works in general, vague impressions as to the upstandingness of her record label, plus thoughts on what her record should have been. I guess it’s just as presumptuous to say, “Yes, this record she made is the record she should have made!” but at least that gives a little more credit to her as an artist than saying, “This is not the record she should have made—and I bet it’s not even the record she wanted to make!” And it sounds less paranoid, and smacks less of projection, to boot.

Sometimes I envy the listeners of twenty, thirty years from now, who’ll get all the best parts of the music that’s new to us today without all the weirdness—all the small-picture squabbling, all the agonizing over minuscule career developments, all the pressures of aligning themselves with a particular fan group or critical camp’s stance on a new release, all the fraught anticipation. Of course, they’ll have their own to fret over. And of course, sometimes all that seems like half the fun. But God knows I’m thankful to experience the careers of so many older artists with the benefit of a longview—sparing my Harvest-loving self the heartbreak and confusion of Neil Young’s Trans years, politely ignoring most of the last three decades of Bob Dylan’s career, etc. Not that history always treats good music kindly, or correctly, but when you can look at someone’s output all spaced out over time, see how things can go from good to bad to good again without the world ending, or without whatever we always think is going to happen when someone we thought we loved once puts out a bad album, it’s a whole lot easier to shut up all the nagging voices in your head—yours and all the others—and just listen.

Rachael Maddux is Paste’s associate editor. Her column appears at PasteMagazine.com every Monday.