Your Sweet Little Myth
It begins with the fade-in of a disagreeable answering machine message. A stand-up bass slides in on the one count, three (or is it four?) notes of a sliding melody start traversing up and down a small set of chromatic stairs. Then, a hi-hat clip-clopping with a tsk-ing tongue backbeat (ts-ts-tss, ts-ts-tss…) arrives to take a ride on the back of the bass. A guitar lurks in the corner, muted but violently so, seemingly ready to strike at any moment. There is a sense of casual foreboding in "True Dreams of Wichita," and its creators in Soul Coughing seem to want the listener to be slightly uneasy even though the song never fully justifies that indefinable apprehension, only ever going for broke during a late-song bridge. And this dichotomy of ease and tension is but one of the many things to love about this work.
Music is universal in its capacities as tool, art form, and cathartic cosplay. This is not only indisputable, but comforting in that it ties all humanity together. Songs themselves, however, can be very singular. They can hit on emotions that resonate in each listener in one or two very specific ways, the mix becoming a cocktail that only that one person can sip. There is a comfort in this as well, and it may be a more profound one. When it works this way, the artist may as well be saying directly to a listener, "This one is for you. Out of all the music in the world that can make you feel things, this exact one is for you so you can feel exactly this. No one else can have it in the same way. Enjoy." I had my first experience with this as a teenager while listening to "True Dreams…"
It starts with the title. I grew up in Kansas, in rural towns some distance outside of the Kansas City suburbs. Dreams about Wichita were a thing that I could relate to in a very concrete way. At one point in the song's opening stanzas, Mike Doughty's narrator tells a vague "someone" that he's "seen the rains of the real world come forward on the plain…seen the Kansas of your sweet little myth." I felt that in its tangible sense, and not solely the metaphoric way that he employed it here. Earlier in the song he makes reference to the Williamsburg Bridge. I knew that place, too! It was years later that I reasoned he was probably referencing the one in New York and not the one I knew of in Williamsburg, Kansas. But even then I didn't care. The reality was that it only added to my sense of familiarity with the track because I had found an extra layer of meaning in that line. Everyone else could have their New York aspirations - I would keep my homegrown prairie certitudes.
What I've grown accustomed to thinking of as Ruby Vroom's Act Two begins with "True Dreams…" and is rounded out with songs that tend to have geographic imagery or significance all their own. "Screenwriter's Blues" is superficially about driving in LA in the pre-dawn hours; "City of Motors" may be about Detroit or it may not be, but it imparts several identifiers of place-ness through its befuddled and imagistic retelling of a tragedy. The locational orientation of "True Dreams…" was the one that pulled me in and made me able to see the rest of the miniature travelogue in all its lavishly neon tones.
The other thing that makes it a relative outlier from its LP neighbors is that its so simple, relatively. The chorus is just the title, sung plaintively with Doughty's voice near-to-breaking by the end. Stood up against some of the other more challenging tracks like "Bus to Beelzebub" and "Down to This", it's a kitten in a cage teeming with fully grown tigers. The LP doesn't give the listener another chance to breathe this much again until closer "Janine", and the ender doubles down on every bit of accumulated sweetness that has come before it, concluding the album on a tonal upswing.
"True Dreams…" gave me a magical sense that people who mattered knew about things that had a history of being overlooked. By this time in my mostly static inner life I had begun to suspect that the flyover states were just that, a humdrum part of the country that was routinely undervalued and ignored. This song seemed to offer a different possibility, that overlooked things didn't get overlooked because they were worthless - rather, they were overlooked as a failing of those incapable of noticing them. But artists with the right mix of vision and empathy could see them with clarity and had the ability to showcase them for all the things they were and all the things they could be.
I've carried that feeling with me to this day, and it's made me someone who tries to steer toward hope when situations are hopeless and toward compassion when indifference is easier. And even now, though I'm eighteen hundred miles from home and even further from the kid I used to be, I can still smell wheat in the dusky air when that first bass note hits.
