Dawes – ‘If I Wanted Someone’

In a recent interview with USA Today, Taylor Goldsmith, the singer-songwriter behind Dawes, said that he wanted his songs to inspire critical thinking. When I read this, I thought that it was an exceedingly odd thing for a singer-songwriter to aspire to. Inspiring critical thinking? Really? That’s all a bit pretentious, I thought. Singer-songwriters are mostly supposed to want to express themselves, or to inspire the listener’s own deep emotions, all whilst being some sort of lyrical wizard. Inspiring critical thinking is the kind of thing that’s much more likely to be an aim stated in a university course outline.

Of course, I’m currently rewriting a university course outline, and I actually really believe in inspiring critical thinking. After all, if you don’t come out of university with the ability to think critically, you’ve more or less failed. In whatever course you do at university, you should come out with an enhanced ability to look below the surface and to figure out how people know what they know, and why people think it’s important. This ability to answer questions about how and why in an informed way is critical thinking.
And so I think critical thinking is a good thing – but do I want it in a song? When I try to imagine a stereotypical song that inspires critical thinking, it sounds pretty stale, the kind of song that’s theoretical but doesn’t have that oomph that makes a song worth listening to. But after reading that interview, I thought about Dawes’ album Nothing Is Wrong, and it occurred to me that it really had inspired me to think about music, to think about my life, to think about the hows and whys.

‘If I Wanted Someone’, to me, sounds like a song that wouldn’t exist without Neil Young. Dig the overdriven Neil Young-y guitar the song begins with, dig the stereotypical Neil Young drum part (boom boom thwack! Boom boom thwack!), and dig the Crosby Stills Nash & Young harmonies on the chorus. And when the chorus begins ‘if I wanted someone to clean me up, I’d find myself a maid’, the line has to be a direct nod to Neil Young’s ‘A Man Needs A Maid’.

Except that Dawes – however respectfully, considering the pastiche – disagree with Neil Young’s old ode to chauvinism. Depending on your point of view, Neil Young’s song will either evoke thoughts about a) how abjectly hopeless men are, how we need women to ensure we don’t fall apart or b) how a woman’s place is in the home, looking after these abjectly hopeless men. As a sometimes abjectly hopeless specimen, I can see the appeal of a) but can also see just how horrifying b) is.

In contrast, Goldsmith rejects the idea that a man needs a maid. Instead, the chorus of ‘If I Wanted Someone’ basically says that different men are different. Some men might want or even need a maid. Some men might want a trophy wife. Some men might want a therapist (many more, I suspect, need one). Goldsmith sings, however, that he wants someone to make the days go easy, someone easy to get along with. Sydney Morning Herald blogger Samantha Brett would be horrified. Different men want different things? Gasp!

I’m not totally sure that I agree with Goldsmith about wanting someone to make the days go easy – I feel like I want a partner who challenges me. I don’t want to get stuck in some sort of easy rut. But Taylor Goldsmith isn’t positioning himself as an exemplary model of modern male humanity. He’s just saying what works for him. And – here’s where the critical thinking comes in – when I listened to this song, it made me think about what I want and need in a relationship. And I thought about why I might want and need that, and why Goldsmith might not.

But, at the same time as the song made me think critically about this stuff, it also went for the heartstrings. There’s a soft spot in my heart for that Neil Young drum beat and for that Neil Young guitar sound, and for a piano solo followed by a guitar solo. And something about the song has a very satisfying feeling of purpose and urgency. It’s not the stale “song about critical thinking” I imagined it to be. And I’m not sure there’s too many more emotionally devastating lines in a song from this year than ‘but the only time I’m lonely is when others are around/ I just never end up knowing what to say.’ (At least, I suspect you’ll find it devastating if you’re like me, and sometimes find it hard to find people in real life who have similar interests – perhaps this is my fault for moving to the famously-shallow Gold Coast?).

So in the end I decided that Goldsmith wasn’t actually being pretentious. He was absolutely right in hoping he’d inspire critical thinking.

Dawes – ‘If I Wanted Someone’

[Ed note: While we're talking about critical thinking, congratulations to Tim who this week accepted a postion as Lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland. Let's hope it leads to many more hours of fascinating thinking and less tutorial paper marking (ergo more great posts for us.) Well done!]