Aaron West is a fictional character, created by Dan Campbell of The Wonder Years. For those unfamiliar, Aaron's story began when Campbell wrote an album. “about the worst year of Aaron West's life”, in which his father dies, Aaron and his wife Diane lose a baby, and their marriage falls apart.
Campbell has commented in interviews that Aaron's story is canonical: it occurs in the same timeline as the rest of us. Fans of the band will recognize callbacks to previous tracks, albums and characters. The album combines banjos, saxophones, pedal steel guitars and punk rock to great effect.
It's been five years since we last heard from Aaron. The main song from the previous album, Routine maintenance, finds Aaron in his childhood home with his mother, his recently widowed sister, and his nephew, Colin. The song is a one-sided conversation with his late father in which Aaron finds some peace with what's left of his family. He tries to comfort his nephew and be a kind of father figure, trying to keep him safe.
The first single from instead of flowers, also the title track, is actually the penultimate song. In a podcast interview, Campbell said that the song serves as “So, I bet you're wondering how exactly I got here.” moment that one would expect from a television series.
In fact, Campbell sees Aaron West's albums as seasons of a television show. He talked about how, unlike a 30-60 minute show, musically it has about 3-5 minutes to tell a complete story and as such is very intentional with imagery and repetition.
Right away, the track finds Aaron sitting in a parked car, apologizing to a new character named Sam. Who is Sam? Why does Aaron apologize to her in a parked car instead of inside? The listener knows there must be some romantic connection, as Aaron says: “I've been empty for so long. I thought that's how I would stay. “No one has seen me without clothes in almost a decade.”
The chorus begins with Sam saying: “Wait, the wound will heal, and when everything is gone, I will write in wet cement, instead of flowers, I will shake the earth, I will be with you until the end.” The next two verses find Aaron trying to make peace with his band (the Roaring Twenties) and, perhaps most importantly, his nephew Colin. Each verse ends with the same chorus, giving the listener a sense of hope that the people close to Aaron will not abandon him despite his repeated failures. The reference to the permanence of concrete and the “bitter end” gives us hope.
So how did Aaron get here? The album opens with “Smoking Rooms,” a track that begins acoustically and sounds like Aaron is playing alone in a bar where you can hear the sound of people talking behind the music. The first line of the entire record is, “It feels like shit to be alone again.”
Aaron calls his nephew home and tells him: “I'll be gone for a few weeks, kid/I hope you understand. I made promises and planned to keep them, but everyone always leaves. “I know you've had a bad time.” Aaron returns to New Jersey, where the COVID pandemic is just beginning in “Roman Candles.”
In the track “Paying Bills at the End of the World,” we find Aaron returning to manual labor to help support Catherine (his sister) and Colin. Because Catherine is a piano teacher, the pandemic has decimated any financial security they once enjoyed. Furthermore, this track shows Aaron's humanistic evolution. He worries about the impact his death would have on the safety of his family rather than the borderline suicidal state we've seen him in on previous albums.
Aaron is funny and sad at the same time. He laughs with Colin for a moment, which is then juxtaposed with the chorus: “I've been having that dream where I die again/Where I get sick and we can't afford it/I've been walking around here without health insurance/And we can barely keep the lights on. how are the things going.”
Importantly, this track introduces us to Sam. The importance of this is evident in the change in music, which goes from a country style song with a steel guitar to a piano. Sam and Aaron had known each other for years before Sam moved away, and they planned to meet up and catch up.
Aaron and Sam meet at “Monongahela Park”, leading to the apology in the driveway at instead of flowers. The title track is also the only song on the album where all 16 members of the band appear. It gives way to huge choruses that contrast with delicately instrumented verses, which become especially quiet during the verse in which Aaron tries to apologize to Colin.
In “Alone at St. Luke's” we find Aaron on tour with his band where his alcohol consumption, initially celebratory, becomes problematic; Campbell's intentional use of repetition comes into play to highlight this as the chorus takes on less festive and increasingly darker meanings with each step. passing verse, “Spitting curses, jumping fences/Burning like true romantics/Picking up fights, it's fucking reckless/We've been thinking/As long as we're still here, we might as well be drinking.”
The track is also autobiographical. Dan Campbell and the band were touring Europe when COVID hit one of the members. The rest of the band returned to the United States, where they all later tested positive. Campbell continued alone, playing the last show at St. Luke's in Glasgow.
Musically, the beginning of the song is fast-paced and upbeat, leading to a solo guitar as Aaron stands alone. After the tour, Aaron is angry and bitter in the following songs. At a show on the west coast, we see Rosa (from rose and mignonette) appear when Aaron's drinking gets out of control. A call from Catherine, in which she reveals that her father drank himself to death, a path Aaron is currently on, results in a stint in rehab as described in “Running Out of Excuses.”
This takes the listener to the title track and the first single, almost the end of the album. Aaron returns to the beginning of the album and the entire story: New York, Brooklyn, the house he once shared with his ex-wife, the house where they lost their baby, the place where his marriage died, and the source of so many things. misery.
I won't reveal the end of this Aaron West “season.” This is a welcome chapter, like any story we've gotten so invested in.
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