Three
minutes into Victoria!,
Downtown Struts' first full-length, a fascinating thematic thread
peeks from the fabric of the record.
It
happens during the coarse, denim verse of “Postcards”, the
record's second song. As gritty rhythm guitars reel back and forth,
as drummer Zach Byrne batters his snare in a steady assault,
singer and guitarist Dan Cooper caws, “It rains today / over San
Francisco Bay / and to LA. / We gotta go, we gotta go
/ but I know we'll stay.” His voice, though melodic, drips during
the last line as he relates the urgency of hitting the road.
“Other
than the chorus,” Cooper says, “all the verses I've said to
people while being on the road—things I said to my parents and
friends. I kind of decided it'd be cool to put real life words that'd
I'd say on the phone into a song.”
It
happens again in “Back to N.Y.”, the record's third song, during
which the speaker admits to missing a friend living in faraway New
York City; alongside a series of resonant, ringing chords, the song
concludes with Cooper wondering, “When will you be back in the
midwest?” And it happens in Victoria's
fourth track, “Tim”, a song about rambling around town at night,
wondering whether where they live feels like home; “Outside
Chicago,” guitarist and singer Ben Hjelmstad bellows, his voice
like a punch in the face, “Nobody's home / It's all right, all
right.” In fact, it happens in some way on every subsequent track;
cities and states are mentioned throughout the band's debut,
alongside the memories they evoke.
In
addition to chronicling the people and places that the band has
visited during their three years together, like some sort of
punk-rock travelogue, Victoria!
captures the complexities of displacement—both their own
displacement and that of their friends', both by choice or as an
unintended consequence, both on tour and off, both as a freeing
feeling and a limiting one.
For
Cooper and his friends, for better or worse, home has always been
wherever they happen to be. “Our group of friends,” he explains,
“for as long as we can remember, we've always been travelers,
whether we play music or we're photographers or filmmakers or
skateboarders. I probably have twenty really good friends and I would
say they're scattered around six major cities in the US.”
Downtown
Struts, though, may be even more transient than the rest of their
social circle. When Cooper started the band with Byrne, they were
still living in Indianapolis, but moved to Chicago shortly
thereafter, where they added bassist Ryan Walsh and, later, Hjelmstad
to the lineup. Since the band started, they also have called Arizona
and San Francisco their home.
Lately,
Downtown Struts has supplied Cooper and his bandmates with a reason
to remain on the move, but the band doesn't necessarily drive this
desire. “Now, it's the music,” he said. “We have to because
it's our job. When we were younger, I just couldn't stand still—none
of us could. All of our friends were like that, we kind of got that
bug to always be doing something. None of us wanted go to college; we
all wanted to be in the arts in one way or another. We were like, 'We
don't need school, We can do this wherever we want. Let's just go to
all the places we want to live.' A lot of people say, 'That's my
home. That's where I belong,' but I always felt like, as lame as it
sounds, my home is not having a home. That was my identity, and that
became the band's identity.
“So
that's why we went to Arizona,” he continues. “Because the
winters are incredible. And we went to San Francisco, where there's a
lot of culture and I'm from there, so it was like being home for a
while.”
“Rocca
Ave.” is about Cooper's relationship with San Francisco. Unlike
Victoria!'s
other tracks—which sizzle in the intense heat of two searing
guitars—this seventh song strolls to the beat built around a
shuffling acoustic. As an organ gurgles melodiously in the background
with Walsh's hopping bass, Cooper croons, “I
stepped inside and I looked around / Nobody's home but I hear the
sound of / the city street, well I can hear her / I
can hear this dirty town.” The song, like its lyrics, feels
melancholy, but not miserable; it expresses the sort of longing that
displacement induces.
“Rocca
Avenue is the street that my grandparents have a house on in south
San Francisco,” Cooper says. “That song was about how, every time
I go back there, it doesn't feel the same as it used to. I don't
really see my family like I used to because I live in the midwest
now. The only time I get out there is when I'm on tour, and I try to
stop by that house, but I don't always have time to do that. Every
time I do, though, it just doesn't feel the same; it's bittersweet.”
Thus,
many of Victoria!'s
songs aren't merely about locations, but also the feelings they
elicit. A theme as central to the record as displacement is the
feeling of being cast aside by society—a punk-rock notion if there
ever was one, but also a direct result of not having a place to call
home. Downtown Struts establishes this idea on the record's prologue,
where Cooper's sings, “Have you ever been face down in the gutter /
Have you ever been face down on the ground / I know I have”; the
same lines are belted by Hjelmstad in “Lost In America” during an
explosive bridge.
Even
“Southpaw,” the record's final track, is about feeling different
from everyone else. “I'm actually left-handed,” Cooper admits,
“and 'Southpaw' is a way of saying 'You're doing everything against
the grain, the wrong way.'” Cooper uses his dexterity as a
metaphor—for how he feels as both an individual as well as a
musician. “I think that, for a lot of musicians that are
unsuccessful,” he says, “that's kind of what they feel like
sometimes.”
These
thematic threads, which tie each song to one another, make Victoria!
as conceptually consistent as it is musically. What makes the record
most meaningful, though, is that Cooper and his bandmates didn't set
out to create something conceptual. Instead, they wrote from their
hearts; what came out just happened to be an honest exploration of
something so central to Cooper—the search for somewhere to
belong—that he could no longer ignore it. Luckily for the listener,
this honesty is particularly apparent and powerful.
For
now, though, Downtown Struts are not displaced. They have returned to
Chicago, a city that Cooper may finally feel comfortable calling his
home. “When I moved to Chicago,” he said, “I didn't really like
it. But, after moving around so much, I would feel weird if I didn't
live here because I love it.” He stops to snicker to himself.
“That's the first time I've ever said I love it,” he confesses,
“and I think I mean it.”
Here,
Cooper becomes suddenly reflective. He considers what has always
inspired his transience, and what is driving his desire to stay in
Chicago. “I thought I hated everywhere,” he concludes, “but I
think I've figured out that I pretty much just love it everywhere.”
Cooper recorded these songs from Chicago on an afternoon toward the beginning of summer. He used a phone in the home office of Byrne’s employer, the only person whose landline phone he was able to secure for the recording.
“Rocca Ave." appears on Downtown Struts' 2012 record titled Victoria!. “Password" is a Kitty Wells cover; the song originally appeared on a 1964 single.
This is the first session that Cooper recorded for the Switchboard Sessions. View and listen to the second session here.
Visit the band’s website for more music.
Sorry, but these songs were taken down due to space constraints. Please download The Switchboard Sessions, Volume Three for a track from this and other sessions recorded in 2012. If you're desperate for a copy of these tracks, please see the "About the Switchboard Sessions" page for info on how to contact the author.
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