fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
“Sucker’s Prayer” is the classic rock song buried on the synth-fever-dream that is the Decemberists' I’ll Be Your Girl, and it hides an extremely clever bit of thematic harmony. When the chorus comes in, supported by a literal chorus, it subverts standard tropes of unrequited or failed love by describing a non-existent one: I wanna love [...]
The fast approaching end of 2019 means not only the end of the year but also of the decade. Ten years ago, in a similar situation, I was new to blogging and felt obligated to make clear that my decade-spanning retrospective was no more than one man's personal opinion. In 2019, there's no need for [...]
I blame Gordon Lightfoot. Many songs incorporate aspects of storytelling but only a few are truly narrative, such that stripping away their music would leave a clear, functional story. And, for whatever reason, those stories tend to focus on the sea. The first, clearest example of this trend is Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund [...]
Three years ago The Decemberists released What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, the band's seventh full-length album which, like most releases from Portland's premier prog-folk outfit, is clever and catchy and thoughtful. Stylistically, What a Terrible World hews closely to The Decemberists' well-established folksy style but the album is no worse for being [...]
2009 was a solid (if unspectacular) year for music, marked by two masterful (if not transcendent) albums and a whole slew of decent-to-good records. For some reason unbeknownst to me, nearly every band that released an album in 2009 released some variety of pop-album, even bands that had never before ventured into those sugary waters [...]
Songs & Stories 