Always Back In Town

a night long ago in Williamsburg with A. Savage

credit Nick Zawisa

At 7:00 PM the dusty wood floors at Union Pool in Williamsburg were empty, save for a few unaccompanied stools and the flickering shadows the candles made against the smoked glass mirror behind the bar. Outside on the patio, under a scalloped blue awning and a few dozen sodium bulbs, a man in a camel-colored work jacket and corduroys reclined against a wall. He talked quietly with a woman in large-framed glasses and pin-straight brunette bangs, holding a slim cigarette. He was relaxed. He smiled as people started to trickle in from the street, and slowly these people began to notice him, whispering to their friends, and he nodded silently at them, and as the crowd fetched drinks from the bar he sipped New York City tap water from his Nalgene. A. Savage was back in Brooklyn.

Tonight was the third of four solo sets that Savage — the frontman of arguably the best New York indie rock band of the 2010s, Parquet Courts — sold out for one week in October at Union Pool. It was a small, intimate space for a small, intimate set. Savage is on a self-described “American odyssey” with his guitar and a decade’s worth of songs. He is rediscovering his relationship with his homeland after leaving the Bed-Stuy apartment he lived in for over a decade for a cheaper studio in Marseille. Savage had originally planned to only play two nights during this homecoming, but then the first two sold out almost instantly, so he added another; when that one sold out just as quickly, he added a fourth.

Tonight’s show in Brooklyn, then, was a gathering of people eager for a glimpse at a lost era in New York City, a time not so long ago when bands wandered the streets passing out flyers to shows and couples could still find a dark corner of Williamsburg in which to make out. “Somewhere young lovers sneak out secretly / Somewhere a ball wrecks a jail to the ground,” Savage sang to the hundred or so people gathered inside. “But nowhere’s like this and nothin’ else is as perfect / As the end of this bar after you’ve just sat down.”

This sentimental, cooled-off version of a Savage performance admittedly takes some getting used to. When I first saw him perform with Parquet Courts ten years ago the band was known for putting on high-energy shows where you could mosh and jump and shout along to songs that mixed despair and wit and hope in equal parts. Savage has a knack for writing lyrics that unravel the miserable knot of modern life and free you to dance on the threads. On “You’ve Got Me Wonderin’ Now,” the opener to Tally All the Things That You Broke, he even manages to turn a toothache into an opportunity for liberation: “Cavity clicks keeps the rhythm, keeps it movin’ / Any day it’s gonna crack / Popcorn kernel, olive pit, at any moment smashed to bits, yeah!”

These songs won Savage diehard fans across the indie spectrum: the Ivy League bloggers at Pitchfork fell for his references to Ovid and Tzara and declared him smart; the state-school dropouts in my old neighborhood fell for his stoned and starving lifestyle and declared him fun. The best Savage songs are word-perfect high-wire balancing acts, where a mouthful of ideas about consumerism and class and community tumble out plinko-style into their proper place. In “Content Nausea,” for example, Savage risks drifting into a sloppy diatribe on doom-scrolling — or what he calls “the consequential chore that unfolds in the naked sprint from screen to screen” — so that he can land on a sentiment that feels as simple and true as what is expressed in any good country song: “This would be a good idea to free poets / From the back padding dungeons of content and comments / To free artists from empty and vulgar broadcasting rituals / For this year it became harder to be tender / Harder and harder to remember / Meeting a friend, writing a letter.” The critic Greil Marcus wrote that “blues grew out of the need to live in the brutal world that stood ready to ambush the moment one walked out of church,” and those old Parquet Courts records were the blues a lot of us needed once we had left the church of childhood disconnectivity and found the brutal world of phones and email. This was Facebook blues, LinkedIn blues, Twitter blues (why are so many social media channels branded blue?)--and best of all it wasn’t preachy. It rocked.

“You’ll just have to imagine that band behind me tonight,” Savage told us on stage at Union Pool. Hewed from the antics, the songs he wrote for Parquet Courts revealed a tender side during the acoustic performance. Take a song like “Always Back in Town,” which recounts the whiplash life of a New York artist who flits in and out of his lover’s life. On the original recording Savage’s voice drones over a guitar riff that sounds like a taxi honking, and the effect is of a narrator annoyed with the tediousness of his lover’s complaints; but paired with just an acoustic guitar and Savage’s patient voice, the song’s lyrics take on a melancholy aspect: “Always back in town / Always making amends / Always staying clean / Always on again.” This narrator is not bored with his lover’s critique, but pleading with himself for personal change. Sounding out each word, Savage’s mouth went a mile wide, his huge voice swallowing the small room whole.

The night’s set included a couple of these Parquet Courts staples, along with songs from Teenage Cool Kids, a band Savage formed back in his hometown of Denton, Texas–one of the world’s quietly magical places–and a remarkable cover of The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Coconut Grove.” (Savage’s covers are impeccable; his 2024 rendition of Lavender Country’s “I Can’t Shake the Stranger Out of You” was a song of the year for me.) But the standouts of the night all came from his two solo LP’s, Thawing Dawn (2017) and Several Songs About Fire (2023), which saw Savage graduate from punk anthems to the kind of gnostic poetics that fans of Leonard Cohen will be familiar with.

The best example, and the most poignant moment of the night, is “Buffalo Calf Road,” a protest song from Thawing Dawn which recounts the story of Buffalo Calf Road Woman, the Cheyenne warrior the tribe credits with knocking Custer off his horse at the pivotal moment of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Savage wrote the song on the occasion of the Standing Rock movement in 2016. Good leftist that he is, his lyrics bemoan the underlying profit motive of the American machine eager to see, then as now, that “gold was bellowed from the bluffs.” This anti-capitalist bearing would’ve been good enough for most leftie artists, but Savage transcends the grad-school Marxist schtick with an uncanny ability to render history in novelistic detail. His Custer at Little Bighorn feels as true as Tolstoy’s Napoleon at Austerlitz: “So said Custer to his men / Surveying the hills / ‘They’ll vacate to their agencies / The ones we don’t kill / And what guns and forced relocation can’t do / Alcohol and isolation will.’”

* * *

“Buffalo Calf Road Woman / Watched the shadows dancing into the infinite / Custer’s horse became increasingly fast and then / She fired the shot to have his body removed from it…. Yeah man, I’m proud of that one,” Savage told me the next day. We sat on the patio at Union Pool as the sun set on the last warm night of an Indian summer. I asked him what it feels like to come back to New York after so many years.

“The city is just in me. In a way it’s a spiritual home, but it was getting increasingly difficult to be an artist here.”

“Is that purely a money thing?”

“Yeah, man. I was priced out of it. I could not afford to make a living as an artist in New York. America is hard. Surviving in America is hard. It’s a brutal place.” But the geography of New York, and of the country as a whole, has never left him.

“I don’t have to think twice about how to get around here,” he said — and he means this literally: Savage, a bohemian to the core, has never owned a smartphone. He is adamant about its uselessness. “We’ve been getting ourselves around just fine for thousands of years.”

“The real problem is that life is getting harder to live without a smartphone,” he continued. “In a way I’m lucky to have the job that I have. Modern labor is so peculiar to me because it seems like you never stop. As long as you have it.”

He gestured towards the black iPhone on the table silently recording the two of us.

“As long as you have that, you never really stop working.”

“The city runs on email,” I suggested.

“Yeah. The city runs on email and QR-codes. At least in Marseille they still have menus.”

I asked what sort of research he did to get the language just-so on “Buffalo Calf Road,” but he demurred.

“Research? Sure, I did that sort of thing. Read a few books. A Wikipedia article….”

It was the wrong question to end on, but I could see Savage was antsy to get back to setting things up before the show. I thanked him and turned off my phone and stuck around for a bit to look over my notes. Right after the venue doors opened, however, Savage reappeared outside and found me.

“You can paraphrase this,” he said. “But the truth is I don’t really know how I write my songs. I don’t know where they come from. You know that Philip Guston quote about how every time an artist enters his studio he brings the ghosts of all the people he knows with him, and how, as the artist works, those ghosts walk out of the room one by one until, if he’s really working, he’ll leave the room too? Ok, that’s a cliché, but that’s true. I left the room when I wrote that song. I don’t know where I went.”

I imagine it’s the same place New York City was before its people were all replaced by email addresses, the same place all the American bohemians were before we priced them out. It’s not Denton, Brooklyn, or Marseille; I don’t suspect you could actually find it on your iPhone’s map. But wherever it is, it’s the place A. Savage calls home.

I’m in a few places at the moment.

In the latest County Highway, I wrote about one of my literary heroes, Ben Metcalf, and his wonderfully strange novel Against the Country. I also sat down with the band American Football to theorize about the real estate of indie music. You can purchase a copy of the issue here, or message me and I’ll mail you one. I’ve got like sixty on the dining room table.

I’m also in High Country News this month, with a cover story about the Phoenix artist Papay Solomon. Papay is freakishly talented and deserves to be better known. The photographer David Blakeman and I visited him last year at his residency in Maine and the three of us drove through Acadia National Park together, chatting about his work. You can read that one here.