All My CDs, pt 46: Save Rock and Roll

Save Rock and Roll - Fall Out Boy

In 2013, shortly after I'd gotten into my head that I was going to run a marathon, I happened to hear My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark on the radio. I decided I wanted it on my running playlist, thinking its driving beat would be perfect for helping to keep up a good pace. This would be the first time in about a decade that I'd bought an album just because I'd heard a song on the radio. Despite my usual habit of ordering online, I decided to pick up a copy at my local record store. It had just been hit by a car (no really) and I thought that my business might help it through that tough time. I have no idea whether it did.

I decided that my first listen-through of the album should be during a morning run. I ended up lengthening that run, on a whim, so I could listen to the whole thing a second time. As luck would have it, Save Rock And Roll is forty minutes of what I call "auditory Gatorade": simple, formulaic music perfectly calibrated to support athletic endurance.  Every song on the album has the essential elements of a good running song. A strong, fast beat is of course part of this formula, but so are lyrics just interesting enough to sound cool but not intellectually stimulating enough to distract from the important task of pushing one's body to its utmost limits.

About those lyrics. They're rather banal, for music that otherwise evokes an intense emotional response. The Phoenix, one of the most adrenaline-pumping tracks on the whole album, actually has the refrain "I'm gonna change you, like a remix / then I'll raise you, like a phoenix." Pretty corny, in my opinion. Then again, it also contains the lines "Time crawls on when you're waiting for the song to start / so dance along to the beat of your heart." That somehow crosses the line from poser to profound. Maybe it was by accident.

Now about those beats. I make no secret of my tremendous bias toward percussion. Some of my favorite songs have percussion as either the only or one of a few instrument types. But I am liable to get just as giddy over a song where the percussion section still pounds deeply into the brain and body despite being accompanied by many other interesting sounds.  Fall Out Boy's percussion crashes and resounds through guitars and orchestral strings in a way that somehow melds chaos and order with its relentless constancy (and provokes me to pretentious language).

Another interesting characteristic of Save Rock And Roll is how much of it was made in collaboration with other musicians. Four tracks out of eleven are “featuring” others, including two of my favorite tracks: Save Rock and Roll (featuring Elton John) and Rat A Tat (featuring Courtney Love). The former has an interesting combination of dismal-sounding lyrics with an sound that makes it seem like those lyrics should be uplifting (You are what you love /not who loves you / In a world full of the word yes / I’m hear to scream / No). The latter is just fun to listen to, and I’m not sure why.

My absolute favorite song here, though, is Young Volcanos. It’s so relentlessly cheery, both in sound and in words:

Tonight, the foxes hunt the hounds
it’s all over now
before it has begun
we’ve already won

I can’t not run a little faster when it comes up in my playlist.

Next: All The Pain Money Can Buy