Midlake, "Roscoe"
A simpler time, when the village had all we need and stonecutters made things from stones
Century Songs is a deep dive into the songs that have meant the most to me in the 21st Century so far, 2000-present. The songs are not ranked, and I’ll be writing about whichever ones seem right that week. For an overview of the project, click here.
On this week’s Bonus Tracks I wrote about the 5 (well, 6) Sickest Riffs of the Century (So Far), which was an exercise in celebrating some of the most fun-sounding music I tend to listen to. It was also, I think, a bit of a palate cleanse between last week’s deep dive into murder ballads and Okkervil River’s “Westfall,” which is both lyrically and musically dark, and this week’s offering, which is dark for different reasons. There’s no murder in “Roscoe,” but there is a darkness of a different sort, and I’d like to spend this week digging into what that means and the power of longing in music.
Quite a few of the songs I’ve written about have been jubilant or downright silly, like “Run Away with Me” and “Knights of Cydonia,” although a few do fall into the more serious or somber categories. I do think I tend to listen to music that’s more in that downer vein; not explicitly “sad” songs, but songs that channel emotions that are less upbeat, more sober, whether or not they have sick riffs.
Of course, music doesn’t need to be lyrically joyful to have catchy hooks. Neil Young, Talking Heads, a little band called The Beatles (especially their solo work): they all work across emotional spectrums while still making music that is (usually) accessible, maybe even deceptively poppy. (Okay, maybe not Neil.) And if we’re talking about riffs, or at least catchy melodies, that still manage to support a melancholic song, “Roscoe” might well be the textbook example.
Midlake formed in 1999 in Denton, TX, which is outside the Dallas-Forth Worth area and is the birthplace of Sly Stone and former home of “Tex” Watson of the Manson Family. I expect that this latter fact is not directly relevant to Midlake’s origins, but it stands out to me because for all the pastoral and homespun elements of their music, there is a haunted darkness at the core of their music that feels deep and rich. Something deeply rooted to a particular earth that sounds ancient and still growing.
Before they became the band that gave us “Roscoe,” however, they started as an experimental jazz/funk group in the spirit of Herbie Hancock, which makes sense considering the members all met at a jazz school. That free jazz spirit, however, still works its way into the music, not just in the instrumentation but in the risk-taking and eclecticism typical of their work. Over time, the jazz influences gave way to classic and indie rock, with vocalist Tim Smith citing bands like Jethro Tull* and Radiohead as major influences. It was a surprising transition but a necessary one, given Smith’s songwriting.
*This also helps explain the preponderance of flutes.
Their debut album, 2004’s Bamnan and Slivercork, has a lot to admire, and the foundation of what the band would become is there. Unfortunately the limited production doesn’t do the music justice, a bit too lo-fi to allow the songs to shine through. But the album had its supporters, and Midlake toured and wrote their follow-up over the next two years, resulting in their critical and commercial breakthrough, The Trials of Van Occupanther.
The album was enthusiastically received at the time, with “Roscoe” being the definitive highlight, sounding so out of step with everything happening musically in indie rock or anywhere else at the time that it seems a minor miracle that it was noticed at all. Pitchfork placed “Roscoe” on their list of the best songs of 2006, and Rolling Stone listed it at #90 on their list of the best songs of the 2000s. But the album doesn’t just end with “Roscoe,” and there’s a lot to still discover and appreciate once that song ends, like the buoyant piano and driving chords of “Head Home.” “Bring me a day full of honest work and a roof that never leaks and I’ll be satisfied.” That longing for rustic simplicity can be found all throughout Van Occupanther, as we’ll see.
As the 70s influence that began with Herbie Hancock and jazz fusion shifted, other artists and styles became touchstones for Midlake’s sound, like Jethro Tull. If you grew up listening to classic rock radio there’s a good chance you’re familiar with the song “Aqualung,” and you might even know the blues-rock shuffle of “Locomotive Breath” or the pastoral “Thick as a Brick.”* Midlake might have traces of all of these songs in their DNA, particularly the moments on Van Occupanther where they rock a little harder, but I’m not sure I can hear a significant influence until you dig a bit deeper. Take a song like “The Witch’s Promise,” a 1970 single that just predates Aqualung, that I think provides a stronger folk-rock blueprint for Midlake to follow.
*And if you didn’t grow up with classic rock radio, you might still know Jethro Tull as the band that beat Metallica for the best metal performance Grammy in 1989, which will never not be funny to me.
Now, I acknowledge I’m not likely to convince you of Midlake’s greatness by citing Jethro Tull, regardless of your personal tolerance for excessive fluting. And to be honest, I don’t think Tull is the best reference point anyway; a better one might actually be Fleetwood Mac. But not necessarily the Fleetwood Mac of 1975-onward, after the addition of Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham, that most of us are familiar with (although more on that below). To me, Midlake draws more from the Bob Welch era that just predates it, a mostly overlooked period of the band that has a lot of strangeness to be rediscovered.
If you aren’t familiar with the pre-Fleetwood Mac era, suffice to say they had a lengthy career with several additions and departures over the years before they became the band that dominated the second half of the 1970s. In 1973 they released their 7th and 8th albums, Penguin and Mystery to Me, now primarily led by songwriter Bob Welch and Christine McVie, then wife of bassist John McVie. None of this is especially important here, except that while these records are generally considered transitional and struggle a bit to have a distinct identity, it’s some of Welch’s songs that stand out to me as informative to Midlake’s sound. Songs like “Night Watch” from Penguin and one of my favorite FM songs from this period, the bluesy folk-rock of “Hypnotized,” that has a surprisingly winning groove and terrific harmonies that almost become yacht rock, or at least would have if the song had come out four years later. The guitars and the vocals, especially the soothing “hmm mms” about halfway through, wouldn’t sound out of place on Van Occupanther at all, and this whole period of FM is fertile territory for rock bands to continue mining today.
And I don’t think the FM comparisons for Midlake stop with the end of the Welch/McVie era, either. Stevie Nicks absolutely knew how to plumb that dark, earthy energy in her contributions to the band, and I hear a lot of Midlake in that classic era. One of my favorites of hers is “Sisters of the Moon,” which, yes, probably has a lot of overlap with Tull’s “The Witch’s Promise,” at least conceptually, but those riffs are way better than anything on Aqualung and also wouldn’t sound out of place on Van Occupanther. Young bands today would do well to listen to more Tusk in general, honestly.
So now that we have a baseline of the kind of territory Midlake was mining on their second album, we can take a closer look at what makes “Roscoe” so special and the ways in which it sets the tone for the rest of the record. We find ourselves living in a pre-industrial world, a time of specialized skills and making things by hand; stonecutters and smiths, a idealized view of the past shared by their contemporaries in bands like The Decemberists and Fleet Foxes.
“Stonecutters made them from stones
Chosen specially for you and I
Who will live inside
The mountaineers gathered timber
Piled high in which to take along
Traveling many miles, knowing they’d get here”
It’s easy to become overly romantic about the past, especially in a new century as progress continues pushing us into places that would be unrecognizable even a decade ago. In 2006 we were still over a year away from the first iPhone and the first messages were just being sent on Twitter. As indie bands looked to the distant past for inspiration, Midlake did so with that earthy darkness, and a fragility and a poetry that distinguishes them from those other bands. The past is gone and has been replaced with a world of uncertainty, of fear and mistrust.
“The village used to be all one really needs
Now it’s filled with hundreds and hundreds of
Chemicals that mostly surround you
You wish to flee but it’s not like you
So listen to me, listen to me”
The palpable sense of longing in “Roscoe” is the crux of its appeal, I think. In his enthusiastic review back in 2006 for The AV Club, Noel Murray wrote that the song, and really the whole album, is “so commanding that there's no better way to react to it than to find a window to stare through — preferably one facing a grove of trees, swaying in an autumn wind.” It’s the sound that comes from Denton, drawing from decades of classic rock and looking to the ancient world for inspiration, that sounds so haunted and distant, yet warm and transportive.
As “Roscoe” continues, Smith compares himself and his love to these pre-industrial people of 1891, who built their houses of cedar and stone.
“Oh, they’re a little like you, and
They’re a little like me
We have all we need”
There’s a simple sweetness of this statement, a purity in how he looks at his partner. Whatever time and place they find themselves, whatever names they call each other, they have all they need within each other. And as that tone carries into the rest of the album and tracks like “Head Home,” we know all they need is a roof over their heads and each other, safety and security, and a feeling of contentment and oneness with the universe, the earth, the village. When I listen to “Roscoe” I feel that longing and that contentment, and it’s a complex feeling that exists outside of time, much like Midlake’s music. The best part of writing Van Occupanther and “Roscoe” is listening to it most of this week, and now that it’s finished, I don’t think I’ll stop listening anytime soon.
Next week: Nothing says regret and yearning like new wave synth-pop out of Las Vegas