999,937: Sloan — Coax Me

The payoff of the archetypal power-pop outfit is seldom stab-you-in-the-heart emotion. Usually what you get is some guy with a beard and an ill fitting T-shirt explaining to you that this or that song is NOT in fact about sunshine and moonbeams, provided you ignore all the music and just pay attention to the lyrics the singer wrote ten minutes before drinking himself to death because he was fucked over by his label. Sloan is as archetypal a power-pop band as they come. So it's no surprise that instead of blindsiding you with sadness bombs they excel instead at the four "C"s of power-pop: Cleverness, Catchiness, Craftsmanship and Cleverness. Taken together, these attributes tend to mute the emotional impact of a song, and they are all evident on Sloan's fan favorite "Coax Me" from way back on their second album. So where is all this heart stabbing coming from?

I don't think the answer is to be found in the lyrics. At first glance you might think you're listening to an affecting rumination of aging, loss and mortality, but pay close attention to the details and you realize tha these lyrics make almost no sense at all. The verses are mostly about the singer, a girl, and some guy who died, but the details are all fuzzy and deliberately obtuse. The verses don't connect at all with the chorus about being "coaxed." About the only part of the song that makes any explicit sense is the portion devoted entirely to explaining with precision and clarity the beef that Sloan's Chris Murphy has with mid 90s Canadian Straight Edge/Industrial/Hip-Hop band, Consolidated. This verse is clever and it's catchy, and as far as I can tell it has nothing to do with the rest of the song. How it doesn't derail the whole enterprise is something that has eluded me for 15 years. Instead, this verse feels no less poignant than the parts about death and grief.

What I'm saying is that if you're looking for some words to carve into your headstone, you might want to look elsewhere. If, however, you're looking for a song to play at your funeral, you could do worse than this one. It has everything you want from a good funeral tune—it's somber, funny, regretful, uplifting, and ultimately, if you let it, it'll stab you right in the heart.

Coax Me - Sloan