Best of 2003? Picks the Critics Might Miss

Chin-pulling music critics, prepare to be confounded. Welcome Interstate Managers, the latest release from the little-known band Fountains of Wayne, is going to be the best album of 2003. Why will critics be so puzzled? Because the album is entertaining for its own sake, which once was (and still ought to be) good enough for rock-and-roll. To appreciate Welcome Interstate Managers is to remember what it was like to scan the summertime AM radio dial some 30-plus years ago, bouncing from confection to pop confection. As on their previous records, FoW is all jangly guitars and tambourines, stultifyingly happy music powered by handclaps and fazed, fuzzed background vocals. Lead singer Chris Collingwood has one of those commercial voices (literally — he has become an in-demand performer/composer of TV themes and jingles) that is compellingly, well, cool. All of that floats on a sea of sunshiny hooks and riffs with addictive powers just a little beyond crack.

How many records are that good? Just about zero. Still, bandleaders Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger deliver something more, deceptively winsome snippets of lyric which, in no more than a phrase, describe moments of real life. The band's previous albums, their self-titled debut and Utopia Parkway, alternately celebrate and poke gentle fun at the gauntlets of adolescent romance and high school tribulation. Welcome Interstate Managers picks up where that left off, the 30-something band members playing back the experiences of 20-somethings encountering the workday as it's really lived. The songs describe common-but-critical insights such as realizing that loneliness won't be sweet melancholy forever, and what it's like to feel the grinning, sorta-kidding angry brass of every testosterone-fueled, cubicle-confined and very male future master of the world.

The range of styles here is impressive. One can imagine Collingwood and Schlesinger yelling over the end of a tune, "Wait, wait, how about this one?" and then slinging another helping of a classic radio staple. There's a Simon & Garfunkel homage, a tongue-in-cheek country weeper, and in what is the best song on the record, "Stacy's Mom," a subversive tribute to romance that exposes the naiveté at the center of teenage lust, while managing to make Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin in The Graduate look like a droopy wallflower.

Welcome Interstate Managers is what pop stars ought to shoot for. Wouldn't it be nice if radio found this record, too?

2001's Southern Rock Opera by the Drive-by Truckers was lavishly praised by critics (including by me on NRO). The album, a remarkable collection of observations by southern men sorting out their conflicted pride about being from the south, made a stiletto of the cudgel that is loud, guitar-driven rock and roll. The music is raw and rough and the lyrics tear scabs off emotion; it provides the most accurate portrait of the modern southern male to be found since Johnny Cash did it in a far more staid way in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Decoration Day is the follow-up. Instead of taking on the scope of SRO, it is a sketchbook of loneliness and loss as seen through the southern experience.

The big surprise of the record is the addition of Jason Isbell, replacing a series of fifth wheels in the band who, with the exception of the song "Late for Church" on the band's first album, have brought little to the Truckers but another guy to help pack the van. Isbell, who appears to have been in high school when his bandmates were already road veterans, kicks in the title track, named for the Southern tradition of an annual remembrance of the dead. Isbell recalls the true story of an age-old family feud with a man named Holland Hill. The narrator has seen his father shot dead; his life is driven by conflict, regret and self-hatred: I never knew how it all got started, / a problem with Holland before we were born / and I don't know the name of the boy we tied down / and beat till he just couldn't walk anymore. / But I know the caliber in daddy's chest / and I know what Holland Hill drives. / The state let him go, but I guess it was best / cause nobody needs all us Lawsons alive.

Isbell's other cut, "Outfit," recounts not only a father's sincere, simple advice to his musician-son (Don't call what you're wearing an outfit / Don't ever say your car is broke) but also a bit of desperate hope that the boy won't end up like dad, spending long days on scaffolds over tarpaulins: So don't let 'em change who you are boy, and don't try to be who you ain't, / and don't let me catch you in Kendale / with a bucket of wealthy man's paint.

That Isbell shines in this band is even more impressive knowing that the other writers, leader Patterson Hood and Mike "Stroker Ace" Cooley, have been writing about the unpaved roads of life for nearly two decades. Hood's "The Living Bubba" remains the best and most unflinching song about AIDS yet written, while Cooley's "Love Like This" rips the romantic gloss off of every classic country song about codependent wives and drunken husbands. (The tunes are from albums Gangstabilly and Pizza Deliverance, respectively — don't be discouraged by the titles.)

Rarely has a band that rocks this hard possessed such an eye for the sharpest edges of hard living. (Decoration Day is banging rock-and-roll with a southern accent; don't imagine that, since this is NRO, we note only the pop equivalent of chamber music.) Unlike the metal screamer bands who (correctly) imagine that meaningless, obtuse lyrics will be mistaken for depth, the Truckers write and sing about real people living real lives, characters who are often lonely but never simple. And these people — often real people from the songwriters' lives — do what they do against a wall of guitar riffs that could pass for the roar of the interstate just across the field — the road that invariably leads to nothing much different than the ubiquitous "here."

In "Heathens," which was the title cut before Isbell came along, Hood says it plain: It gets so hard to keep between the ditches when the roads wind the way they do. By chronicling that truism with straight-ahead rock-and-roll, the Drive-by Truckers remain the best unheralded band in popular music today.