“Flag and Family”
from the album Happy Hollow
2006
iTunes
This isn’t the first time Tim Kasher of Cursive has turned his attention to matters of faith and hypocrisy.
He was raised Catholic, after all.
In Omaha, no less.
“But I used to express it with a lot more angst and hostility as a teenager,” he says. “I was just on the cusp of recognizing a lot of the disillusionment that America is run by this whole marriage to religion. And I was kind of ferocious about it at the time. But nine years later, in returning to it, I kind of wanted to take a little bit more of an enlightened approach, not just simply point a finger or bash on anything in particular too much.”
Religion plays a starring role in any number of the highlights of his band’s new concept album, Happy Hollow, as characters fight for their piece of the pie they’ve been promised but tragically find that it “can’t fill our bellies.”
In “Big Bang,” Kasher coyly weighs in on creationism versus science with “They say there was this big bang once, but the clergyman doesn’t agree/ Oh no/ There was this big bang once, but it don’t jive with Adam and Eve, original sin, idyllic garden, some talking snake giving apples away.” Then, the payoff arrives in the form of a shouted question. “What would that snake say if he could only see us today?”
In “Bad Sects,” for instance, a preacher is filled with regret in the wake of a drunken night of indiscretion with a new recruit. In “Retreat!,” as the angular, horn-fueled groove goes almost No Wave, “The natives are whippin’ each other over which God they prefer.” And in the bluesy “Flag and Family,“ Kasher plays a shiftless teenager whose girlfriend’s father and his own dad are conspiring to send him off to war as a character-building experience.
“I put up with your family,” he shouts at his girlfriend, “full of bigots and fanatics/ Just to get a little closer to you/ Now you’ve turned on me, too/ When you’re down on your knees, are you praying for Holy War?”
It wouldn’t take a lot to read a certain anti-Bush agenda into much of Happy Hollow, but it goes beyond that, really.
“That would be an element of it,” says Kasher. “But it’s not about Republicans or Democrats. It’s really just America, its culture conflict and religious conflict. And it even goes beyond America.”
As for the title, yes, there really is a Happy Hollow.
As Kasher explains, “There’s a street that runs through a really wealthy neighborhood in Omaha called Happy Hollow. But the Happy Hollow on the record is a small rural town that probably isn’t deep in money, so it really isn’t based on that. It’s just that we grew up with that name and that neighborhood. And it’s funny because you spend a lifetime knowing the name Happy Hollow, but it’s just a name, you know? A moniker. But then, when I was working on this record and thinking about it, it occurred to me that it was just a really funny paradox.”
The album’s final track is a playful review of what Kasher refers to in the song as “14 Hymns for the Heathen.”
“I really like using that word, heathen,” Kasher says, “in particular because it’s defined as godless people, who don’t practice religion, don’t believe in God. And it has a very negative connotation to it. But why? We just spent some time in Japan, and it’s filled with just millions of heathens but not with a negative connotation.”
For as dark as the themes the new album addresses can be, the overall mood is surprisingly upbeat — in part because the lyrical approach is more satirical than angry, and in part because the music is so damn infectious, replacing the cello-driven sound of 2003’s The Ugly Organ, with a punch-drunk wall of horns arranged by Bright Eyes‘ own Nate Wolcott.
“I’m pretty happy with the way it all worked out, as far as the music being very upbeat,” Kasher says, “so along with the horns and the title, it really helped to kind of push this whole idea of the surface of the community, the happy exterior that we all kind of want to put forth. And then, as you work on the album and kind of get deeper into it, you see it’s not like that at all.”
He’d been wanting to bring in the horns since first trying them out on a few songs for The Ugly Organ.
“This lightbulb went off,” he says, “with the possibilities of what you could do with that kind of instrument. It’s the same way it was with the cello and strings. And it felt great just working through that process and utilizing that timbre of music.”
The departure of cellist Gretta Cohn, who left the band and Omaha behind for New York City, was not, he says, a factor in the string-free sound of Happy Hollow.
“If anything,” Kasher says, “part of the struggle of all the decision-making about whether we were gonna do another album and how the cello would be involved is that we kind of slowly came to the conclusion that maybe it wouldn’t be appropriate to use cello as intensely as we did on The Ugly Organ ’cause we didn’t really want to do that kind of record again. And I guess through a lot of indecision and what not it finally came to a point that worked out for us and for her. It all kind of made sense, which made it easier to move forward.”
The other thing holding them back for a while was an old-fashioned indie-rock fear of success. The Ugly Organ, after all, had elevated Cursive to a profile Kasher wasn’t sure he wanted once he got there.
“For a little while, it kind of felt like it was plaguing us,” he says. “We kind of had to reassess if this is what we wanted to do with music or not, as far as accepting it as a successful venture as well.”
With a laugh, he admits, “That’s just kind of a lot of artistic tripe, and I wish I didn’t have to be such a cliche that way. But it’s kind of the truth, too, in a way. And people have to go through that sometimes. But I feel very refreshed after the whole thing and I guess I just feel like I approach it with a much more mature attitude now. It’s positive to have people interested in what you do. That’s great as a writer, as an artist, as anyone. So now I’m kind of glad because it’s nice to working from that kind of platform.”