Syrup, Sophistication, And Grit
Daniel Hornsby on Prefab Sprout's 'Bonny' + Aux Cord Revelations + Outgrowing Millenial Americana
On my 21st birthday, studying abroad in the UK, I made my way alone to Limerick, Ireland, to see Josh Ritter, a singer-songwriter from Idaho. I was on my own, with an extra ticket from a friend who’d backed out. I got lost on the way and sought the help of a short Irishman who looked like a red-haired Martin Sheen.
“Going to see Josh Ritter, are ya?” I gave him my ticket, and he bought all my drinks for the rest of the night.
He was a sportswriter. His beat was the fox hunt. He described the subtleties of the “sport” to me—the training of hounds, the brilliance of foxes—in great detail while we filed into the venue.
The opening act was another singer-songwriter, Joe Pug (who now hosts a pretty good podcast on songwriting). He wore a little newsboy hat and earnestly strummed his way through songs that mashed up the moves of early Dylan and John Prine, with titles like “Speak Plainly, Diana” and “Bury Me Far (From My Uniform).” Ritter was a charismatic and gracious performer, and I remember him being surprisingly jacked. He was able to pull focus on the big, sweeping songs, but there was also a goofiness. I got the sense he wanted more irony than was found in his music.
This was the last gasp of my interest in Americana music. Growing up in exurban Indiana, I’d thought Bob Dylan was cutting edge. Like that white dude with dreads in the Counting Crows, I’d wanted to be Bob. I didn’t wear the vests or the newsboy hats (ok, maybe once or twice), but I did play in a band that could be described as folk-rock, and most of the artists I listened to were white boys with guitars and banjos who wrote about their lives in states that at least that adjoined the ones where I’d lived (Indiana, Kansas). Finding my way to these artists had been exciting: like a lot of people my age, I’d been seeking refuge from mainstream culture in the wake of the terrible Bush years. And this was music we could make ourselves with just acoustic guitars and a handful of chords. But my attachment to the genre was starting to fade, even if I didn’t yet understand why.
At the concert, the sportswriter and I befriended a couple of women from Manchester. After the show, we went back to his place for a few more drinks. His friend met us there, he made antennas for cellular phones.
The sportswriter’s apartment was all peach and pink, like the interiors in The Simpsons. Once he’d poured our drinks, he put a CD on his fancy stereo. He told us the band’s name, but it was so ridiculous I forgot it immediately.
The first song he played mixed straightforward pop/rock instrumentation with layered synthesizers and shimmery chorus guitar. The singer sounded like Elvis Costello, but less nasal, with more of a full-throated croon that broke as the choruses built. A woman’s playfully panned and processed backing vocals bounced between the speakers. It pulled me in two directions. The melody and the singer’s vulnerability drew me in, but I was still enough of a folkist to be turned off by the artificial sheen of the production. Still, the song left splashes of color in my young, drunk mind: dark pinks, lavender, light blues.
“Truly sophisticated pop,” said the sportswriter. “Amazing songwriting. If someone likes them, you know they’re cool.”
“I feel that way about the Velvet Underground,” I said, being young, dumb, and provincial. The sportswriter groaned and ribbed me for being a baby.
Shortly after this concert, I shed my folky ways and became a more omnivorous listener. I began to feel that most people working in the folk singer-songwriter vein were cliches, borrowing prepackaged meanings and symbols, nostalgic for artists who probably would’ve hated their lack of originality. (To be clear, I do like the old folk stuff, from the old author-less standards to the commie Greenwich Village crew. I just can’t stomach the homespun, witless wisdom of the last few contemporary waves.)
Back home in Kansas, that song from the sportswriter’s apartment tormented me. I wanted to hear it again, but I had no nouns, no lyrics, no search terms. I could remember the colors of the sound and a few musical traits: lots of major 7th chords; a moody, lush, synthy vibe; Elvis Costello meets Sade. But that was it. A bad police sketch.
Years later, at a party in Ann Arbor, a different friend took the aux cord (the white guy tradition, our ancient maneuver), fished for a song on his phone, and hit play. There it was: the song! I could see its pastel palette in my drunk little brain. I asked my friend what it was: “Bonny” by Prefab Sprout, a band from Durham, England, part of the wave of literate eighties pop from Scotland, Ireland, and the north of England (see The Blue Nile, The Sundays). The track was from their 1985 swan song, Steve McQueen. New Wave synth wizard Thomas Dolby produced the record, which helps explain its balance of syrup, sophistication, and grit.
I’d just gone through a breakup, and now I listened to Steve McQueen every day as I ran errands around town and stumbled back from the bars. Music itself is just flavored time, and “Bonny” is partly about counting it:
I count the hours since you slipped away
I count the hours that I lie awake
I count the minutes and the seconds too
All I stole that I took from you
Like the best Smiths songs, it strikes that beautiful balance between youthful longing and aging regret. It is the kind of song that, as a young person, makes you preemptively nostalgic for future heartbreak, priming the pump of your tears:
All my silence and my strained respect
Missed chances and the same regrets
Kiss the thief and you save the rest
All my insights from retrospect
Last summer, during a recording session in Memphis for one of my own songs, the drummer, engineer, and I bonded over our love of Prefab Sprout. Our conversations helped me understand my affection. The Americana I’d loved in my late teens and early twenties took itself very seriously. Too seriously: the songs were often platitudinous and one-note. Prefab Sprout had a richer, stranger mix of emotions and lyrics layered with meanings that didn’t always reveal themselves right away. There’s silliness, both winking and unintentional, and pristine production. It’s simultaneously experimental and an heir to Gershwin and Cole Porter. (The best comparison is to Elvis Costello, but Paddy McAloon, the band’s founder, hates being lumped in with Costello for some reason.)
Not long ago, I was hanging out at the coffee shop when a young friend who worked there played “Bonny” over the stereo. They’d used it to get through a breakup, too, and now had their own sad nostalgia for it, fresher than mine. I’d pivoted around the song: now I was the old writer guy extolling the virtues of sophisticated pop across an age gap. As a midlist novelist, I’d even fallen into the same trade as the sportswriter.
I always wondered, when I was young, why anyone older would want me, a little dipshit from Indiana and Kansas, around. Back then, I wanted to be old. I wanted a deeper, more resonant voice and involved lines on my face. All the folk musicians I loved treasured this sort of wear and tear, associating it with, I don’t know, alcoholism and train hopping. It’s so obvious, but now that I’m a little older, I see how much the young bless the old. My younger friends help me look again at things I might have written off and keep me from hardening into something brittle and bitter—prefabricated, even—an easy trap for a white guy approaching middle age.
Sitting in the coffee shop with my friend, I pictured the sportswriter listening to “Bonny” on his stereo, writing about a fox pursued by hounds, slipping at the last moment into the brush. ✹