Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Abigail Bruley
Near the end of the Bright Eyes song “When the President Talks To God,” Conor Oberst downright slays and fillets the line, “Does he ever smell his own bullshit?” – about you-know-who, letting his gums and his tightly clenched teeth show like a threatened, hungry and desperate wolf. He sounds like a grill and then he smartass-edly throws in the one-off, “I doubt it. I doubt it.” It’s the most impressionable piece of lyric in the song and is the sharpest stick meant to jab into the side of the regime. It’s probably the only line that Cursive and The Good Life lead singer Tim Kasher wishes was his own. The reason it might not be such a source of envy though is because Kasher wrote a jillion lines of equal candor about such pregnable things as the Church and he thinks those snappy one-liners about the State all the time. He must because he was fired up about last week’s mid-term elections (see: snappy one-liners and references to smelling bullshit below) and because he and Cursive released a record this year—Happy Hollow—that gets all up into the face of the Catholic church. Raised in a religious family and now an atheist, Kasher challenges the close-mindedness of staunch parishioners and takes on the bloated, sacred cow, singing in “Big Bang,” “They say there was this big bang once but the clergyman doesn’t agree…Some talking snake giving apples away/What would that snake say if he could only see us today?” The idea of gullibility and blind affirmation rages through his scorching narratives, giving them an affecting blanket of fire. The empty minds and the vacant souls that asked to be spoken to and are therefore spoken for are the gerbilized people he’s cornering. He’s suggesting that some (many) are perpetuating a live and just be generation and he’s choking on his Adam’s apple because of it. There’s also an underlying theme of never getting out of a no-dream small town, where the waters run slow with complacency. There’s nothing gratuitous about Kasher on Happy Hollow, another of his watermarks. It’s a macabre means of tearing the Good Book and the majority of an atlas in half, gutting them and shredding them until they can’t stand up. How can we not be excited for a new Good Life record after all of this fun?

What Kasher’s life was, the first full week of November 2006:
THE ELECTION: Initially, I was really surprised by the shift in congress—I think many of us were. We were dragged through that republican mire for so long that—wait, no we weren’t, it just felt that way because A LOT of fucked up shit has happened in a relatively short period of time. It occurred to me; this shift is just part of a cycle, isn’t it? Because it was WAY too easy. Wasn’t it? Are you older? Are you part of an older generation, like a baby boomer or something? ‘Cause I’ve been wanting someone to verify this, but I’m pretty sure that it’s as simple as that: a cycle. We get tired of smelling this bullshit, so we smell that bullshit. And for a little while (like this week, for instance), we like it. By the way, the democrat who ran for a house seat in Nebraska was this kid who lived up the street from me growing up. He’s only thirty years old. That’s YOUNGER THAN I AM, and… HE ALMOST WON. Holy crap, what have I been doing all these years. Vote Jim Esch. Also—and this will be my last political comment (but come on, it was a big week)—Mr. Rumsfeld resigned this week. Hoorah. I will leave it at that, but will mention an interesting article in the New York Times the other day about soldiers in Iraq who, when informed about his resignation asked, “Who’s Rumsfeld?” An interesting article.

What have I listened to?
NINA SIMONE: A friend had me pick up a Nina Simone record earlier this week. I have certainly loved her in the past, just picked up a different record. Can’t recall the name of it unfortunately, but so many of her records are just collections anyway. I imagine one could recommend anything by her. This one has a blues bent to it, and is SUCH a good collection of songs. I think I said something like, “Wow, Nina makes me like the blues” or something like that. Nina Simone is SO passionate, she makes me wish I was black so I could be a Black Panther. She makes me feel so wonderfully guilty for being white.

What have I watched?
So far I have declared 2006 to be the WORST YEAR IN MOVIES EVER. But, I haven’t had a chance to see many of the movies that I’m HOPING will save the year. Why? Because I live in Omaha. And to be fair, I’ve also been on tour all season. BUT, I have had AMPLE opportunities to catch such fine cinema as “Gridiron Gang”, “The Protector,” “The Covenant,” “Fearless,” “Invincible” and “The Marine,” which I think are all about possessed kids playing football. If anyone has seen “Half Nelson,” “Sherrybaby,” “Stranger Than Fiction,” Oh, and my girlfriend and I saw “The Wicker Man” at the dollar theater last week…The guy at the ticket counter actually replied, “Seriously?” when we bought the tickets. And then Sarah wouldn’t let me sleep during the movie. Bummer.

Cursive
Saddle Creek Records