#406: Adam Schmitt, "Elizabeth Einstein" (1991)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdxyXJqgvNI

We have another case where there's the artist's usual style, and then there's the song in question. Adam Schmitt's album World So Bright is, in general, an excellent collection of "power-pop". That's a species of indie-pop premised, I believe, on the idea that since the Beatles' Help! was an immensely charming record that everyone loved in 1965, and inspired dozens of soundalikes to record hits of their own, music inspired by it should still be loved by everybody today.

This is not, in my view, a completely silly premise.
Medical science has made many new discoveries in the half-century since, but those do not include widely-available synthetic ears build on different principles from our natural ones. Pleasant, eager guitar-driven tunes that put daring little melodic twists in amongst the familiar: you might assume that one would either like those or not, regardless of decade. Nonetheless, if I give you a top-of-my-head listing of some artists who've made really good power-pop records during the time I've been paying attention -- Dramarama, Jason Falkner, Cotton Mather, Shalini, Tris McCall, Charlotte Hatherley, Jed Davis, Andrew Jackson Jihad -- it may occur to you that they all sell rather fewer records (even combined) than the Beatles (by an order of magnitude). R.E.M. had some power-pop hits ("Pop Song '89", "Stand", "It's the End of the World as We Know It"), and the Gin Blossoms had "Hey Jealousy". Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta" was a power-pop one-hit wonder for a band that deserved more, and Third Eye Blind's "Semi-Charmed Life" was for a band who perhaps didn't. Barenaked Ladies' "One Week" and "Pinch Me" were hits too, though in part for the quasi-rapped bits.

But mostly power-pop has been eclipsed by punk-pop, which is similar, and often excellent in its own right, but makes the melodies simpler and the words angrier or more open-wound-like. There's not much money, anymore, in songs like Adam Schmitt's "Can't Get You on My Mind", and it's hard for me to believe that's not a failure of capitalism on its own terms.

There's a catch, though. Only three of those eight artists I listed between those dashes will show up on my favorite songs list, just as Help! is certainly not my favorite Beatles record. Adam Schmitt wouldn't be on the list either, quite, without "Elizabeth Einstein". It's a folk song, and folk, unlike power pop, is a genre artists tend to choose when they want you to care about the words they're singing. It's a love song. Unlike most love songs, which focus on the emotion itself and allow any listener to apply it to anyone they wish, it's just as much a portrait of the loved. Elizabeth is smart, chatty, opinionated, and hesitant about the entire idea of romantic love. The narrator enjoys listening to her and being wowed, and while he wishes fervently she *wasn't* hesitant, because it hurts to want and not (at least yet) be wanted back, he respects her thought process and her quest.

It isn't a scene from my life, but it could have been; smart and opinionated is exactly my type. My Mom saw her young self in Elizabeth, which of course made her swoon. Someone reading these pieces in order might see Emma Pollock in her. Someone willing, as I am, to forgive the Gilmore Girls its frequent bouts of clumsiness might even see Dean and Rory in the beginning, before too many mandatory plot twists made him annoying, and without the assumption that anyone involved looks like an actor in a TV drama.

Too many pop songs celebrate the loved one for virtues like "she's got legs, and is ambulatory". (For the record, I reject this even on a superficial level, as one of the prettiest women I ever dated had legs and did not know how to use them, thanks to cerebral palsy.) "Elizabeth Einstein" aims for something more. It has all the melodic virtues of the other songs on World So Bright. They come at us more slowly, so we can examine them better.