For starters, even when they avoid cruel irony, the group’s heavier dose of historical references threatens to tip into parody. “Yeah,” admits Schlesinger, “sometimes if we’re writing something or recording something and it starts to remind us of a certain thing, we’ll go more toward it rather than shy away from it.” This can be fun, for sure. I always find myself waiting for the Billy Joel reference on the rollicking “Strapped for Cash,” and it must have been a blast to have been at the Portland (Oregon) show where the group alternated between their own songs and Billy Joel covers. Schlesinger: “I really don’t know why [we did that]. Billy Joel is just one of those things. I don’t think we ever as a group decided if we like him or hate him, but we know all those songs. So we just can’t stop ourselves . . . it’s like a disease.”
The price of parody, however, is distance, and even when the music circles in more tenderly, its subjects are often fatally distanced from themselves, trapped in a rootless anomie that spins them from one missed connection to another. This theme climaxes with the penultimate number, Schlesinger’s “New Routine,” a tour de force of arranging, producing, and thematic shuttlecock worthy of Babel, and ultimately just as desperate.
“I think in everybody’s life there’s probably a sense of loneliness that creeps up from time to time — if not all the time,” says Schlesinger about his songwriting on Traffic and Weather. The reason he mines it, he explains, is “that’s just part of making a song feel true, or something.” As we speak, however, he’s still celebrating the birth of a baby who’s not two weeks old, the second child in his eight-year marriage to a successful New York graphic designer, and he sounds as charged as every new dad should be. (“Oh my God,” I overhear him exclaim to the delivery guy in the hall, “Is that for us?”)
My suspicion, then, is that this shiftless anomie also has a lot to do with the more reclusive partner in the songwriting duo, lead singer and group co-founder Chris Collingwood. A long-time resident of central Massachusetts, near Northampton (“He’s kind of a small-town boy at heart”), Collingwood steps farther into the shadows here. He no longer attempts the shift into falsetto that allowed for æsthetic release on the group’s previous albums, and he’s also bequeathed the production duties to his partner. (“That’s not to say that Chris is not capable, but it’s just not something that he’s particularly interested in.”) Furthermore, at least two of Collingwood’s compositions, “Hotel Majestic” and the lovely “Fire in the Canyon,” seem to take the anomie very personally. “We’ve been wandering alone such a long time,” he croons in the latter. “Lose our way as we go town to town/Believe us to be born in a path straight and narrow/On every crooked road we travel down.”
This downer isn’t fatal, and it’s as bracing to hear in this sweet pop context as it would be in any anti-pop-rock maelstrom or dose of hip-hop fatalism. But as Schlesinger has recently been reminded, the road always circles back. And this enormously talented duo still have all kinds of time to follow it home.
