Drive-In Movies You Can Dance To: An Album from the Back Seat
Review by: Emily D. Schmidt, Writer
Edited by: Andrew Perrizo, Owner/Editor @PlaylistTC
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A double album with 22 fantastic tracks, Annie and the Bang Bang’s “Radio Baby” offers variety in just about every aspect that an album can. The title track states, “I am an FM radio baby raised in the back of a car,” and like an FM radio on a long road trip, the album switches tones and genres often. Its lyrics also give the listener opportunities to imagine music videos or feature-length films, the perfect thing to do on a long road trip. As songwriter and lead singer Annie Enneking puts it, the songs on Radio Baby are “drive-in movies you can dance to.”
As someone whose ear doesn’t tend to gravitate towards lyrics, this album’s storytelling caught my attention because of the lyrics’ imagery and the way the music matches them. I studied English in college, and one of the earliest things I remember a professor telling me was to observe both the form (structure) and the content (subject matter) of art. Radio Baby has given me a fun opportunity to flex my English brain and dig into both the music and the lyrics of the album.
Every song on Radio Baby can take you to a different place, and the second song, “Wind Phone” took me to a cliff above a stormy sea. Its asymmetric musical phrases in the verses remind me of rocking back-and-forth in a boat on choppy waters, followed by a gust of wind that makes you pause and catch your balance. The melody is unpredictable, creating whimsy and unfamiliarity. Coincidentally, the chorus sings, “There is a phone booth in Japan that overlooks the ocean” over an upward-climbing melody that peaks and recedes like the tides. For someone like me who has never been to a stormy cliff in Japan, the music takes me there in my head.
The following track, “Boys in the Mosh Pit Are Having Feelings,” offers something totally different. Starting with a gritty guitar riff, Enneking’s vocals slither over in broad phrases that I imagine floating over a sweaty crowd and directly into my head. As the verse morphs into the bridge, the drums slowly incorporate more washes of cymbals, the bass and guitar wrestle over each other, and the chaos builds. The tension releases as the chorus breaks into a more unified clarity. The catchy title in the lyrics mirrors the instruments’ rhythm. On top of my imagined sweaty crowd beneath Annie and the Bang Bang’s stage, I see exclamatory scribbles dancing above, animating the sound waves and band members’ motions like in “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World.”
Like the other songs, the music and the lyrics of “Disaster” paint images as well, but a juxtaposition between the verses and the chorus of “Disaster” paints two different images. The verses on this song have some of the simpler instrumentation of the album. The bass and guitar stroll along a sidewalk while the melody weaves through trees above and around mailboxes. The lyrics list odd objects that a new friend shows the speaker, like a dream journal, a baby tooth, and bones from a mouse, little things I can imagine a kid collecting. Paired with the music, I long for a summer day in the neighborhood while my parents are at work and I’m too young to drive.
Then the chorus comes and the tone changes. I’m driving on the highway. I look on the horizon and see the deep red and orange of the sunrise. I’ve been driving all night. The guitars oscillate between two chords that never seem to resolve, and the back-up vocals sizzle beneath the lead. “Glad I asked her [...] what a fetching disaster” sums up the sting I get from this song. Whatever it was that led me here, I knew what I was getting myself into.
These tracks are just a few of those on Radio Baby that created vivid images in my head. I imagine that if I were to listen to the album on a road trip, I could create a feature-length film. Enneking mentioned to me that road trips have been a huge part of her life. Touring with the band, the road is where a lot of their inspiration for Radio Baby came from. She also said, “My writing is really based on the idea of the body being in a particular place and time.” Traveling 75 miles per hour is equivalent to 110 feet per second. That’s a lot of places at a lot of different moments, but at the same time, it’s all while you’re sitting in the same place in the car. For many, driving can be a meditative experience. With nothing but time and a long road ahead, it’s the perfect place to practice being imaginative and thoughtful. Listening to Radio Baby is a great soundtrack to do just that.
