The conflict-of-interest police insist that I come clean with
my relationship with the Good Life. Fine. During the swelling optimism
of election week 2004 I found myself not campaigning for the end of the
Bush regime, but instead drunk in Tokyo, Japan, tagging along with a
band that was not the Good Life. But, as bands often do on
overseas excursions, they were sharing some dates with the Omaha
quartet, and so that meant I was spending time under the flickering
lights of Shibuya with the Good Life as well. Other than their penchant
for vending machine Sapporo—a thirst that eclipsed even mine,
although I swear my interest was merely the novelty of purchasing booze
from a robotic machine perched on a crowded subway platform—I
learned little about their mannerisms, interests, personalities, or
about the Good Life as an entity.
But the band itself is not the story here, nor is my lack of a
relationship with them. Instead it’s their music that warrants your
attention. Four records in seven years, all uniquely different, all
great. First was 2000’s debut, Novena on a Nocturn, which found
Tim Kasher—frontman of indie titans Cursive—sullen and
sleepy-eyed, unsure of where this solo vessel was taking him, but
resigned not to fight it either way. Percussion was primarily in the
form of bedroom electronic beats, and the typically raw howl of
Kasher’s banshee vocals were pleasantly restrained. The Good Life
suddenly felt important.
Album number two, Black Out, lived up to its title. It’s the
record you make freshly divorced, hemorrhaging emotions while holed up
during the most brutal of Omaha winters. It’s an unanswered cry for
help muted by the cold and uncaring touch of alcohol. As a listener,
this is the one record you keep behind a glass case, only smashing your
way in during the direst of circumstances. It’s at this point in their
catalogue that you, the rabid fan or just the casual follower, have to
come to terms with the Good Life. Their recordings will never be
pleasant excursions. Instead feelings get hurt, the bad gets worse, and
even the most tender of bruises refuse to fade. If you want to leave,
do it now.
If you stayed, you know that 2004’s Album of the Year was
what put the Good Life on the map as more than just a side project to
kill time between Cursive albums. The record, with its boisterous title
and calendar-themed song structure, started out with the protagonist on
the floor throwing up in a ladies’ room stall, and wrapped up 12
songs/months later with little closure, personal growth, or
soul-touching moral experiences. Here, life lessons are not learned,
people do not better themselves, and adversity is something you fail to
overcome just before the screen fades to black and the credits roll.
This is not Hollywood cinema.
Or maybe it is. Kasher has recently bid farewell to Omaha (his
second time trading the Cornhusker State for the West Coast, the first
being a mid-’90s temporary relocation to Portland) and settled in
Tinseltown to sell his wares not as a musician, but as a scriptwriter.
The Good Life’s fourth album Help Wanted Nights portrays
characters from Kasher’s debut screenplay that (not surprisingly)
frequent a small-town bar and whose stories are told with the soft
touch of a man who can write about the human condition in a way that so
few can. There is “Keely Aimee,” a flawed, if not cursed, woman whose
struggles attract the sympathy of the song’s narrator, who sings,
“Keely Aimee, I know this world is such a heavy weight/And, Keely
Aimee, those crows’ feet perched at such an early age/Well, I’d help
you shoo those birds away/If the burden’s just too much/See, Keely, I
love your suffering like gravity loves a stumbling drunk.”
It remains to be seen if the soul-crushing power of Hollywood can
silence the reality of Kasher’s characters (a wacky Keely Aimee sitcom
perhaps?), but judging by the raw beauty of Help Wanted Nights,
that seems unlikely. In fact, I’d wager that there is little that can
stop the stride of the Good Life, a dynamic band whose best recordings
still might lie ahead of them. Then again, maybe that’s just the
conflict of interest talking. After all, I did sing karaoke with them.
The song was Toto’s “Africa,” and while I sounded like a drunken mess
in that crowded Tokyo bar, they sounded absolutely perfect.