Big Thief's "Shark Smile"

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Big Thief’s “Shark Smile” participates in a specific, venerable tradition of alternative/college/indie/art-rock: the rambling, incongruous, discordant, and even borderline off-putting instrumental intro that precedes a catchy or even “pop” song recorded by artists who otherwise courted an identity as “edgy” or “innovative.” “Sweet Jane”; “100%”; “Star Sign”; “Cannonball”; “Texas Never Whispers”; “Corona”. That’s a killer mixtape right there if you happen to dig the music of well-read white people who dress poorly.

Now, obviously, there are differences of degree and even kind in that list. The “Corona” intro is a quick hit of tension that releases when the song kicks into gear. The intro to “Sweet Jane” is pleasantly boring. The intro to “Star Sign” is unpleasantly boring at great length. And the intro to “Texas Never Whispers” will cause you actual physical pain if you’re wearing headphones. But in all of those cases, if you stick around, you get to hear one of the catchier songs by the artist in question.

Perhaps this maneuver is done to signal seriousness—after all, The Beatles never did rambling intros when they wanted to hold your hand, but once they were serious artistes they couldn’t resist an occasional prelude. Or maybe bands just want to punish the listener for having the audacity to skip right to the catchy song.

The more recent example of Big Thief, though, makes me consider another possibility specific to the streaming age, which is that the discordant intro is a tactic to scare away any listener who would skip the song after hearing the first five seconds on a Spotify playlist.[1] A streaming service is certainly how I discovered this song—it’s really how I discover any interesting music these days, since Brookside is not exactly the epicenter of KC youth culture. Regardless, I’m glad I stuck around, because once “Shark Smile” got past the intro, it sunk its teeth into me as much as anything else I’ve heard this decade.[2]

At its core, it’s a lovers-in-a-car song. Closer inspection of the lyrics reveals it to be a lovers-speeding-toward-death song which also includes a vampire who might or might not be metaphorical. But I don’t know that the lyrics matter much in their specifics beyond their ability to convey in a few deft word-clouds the image of an object of desire flickering in the passing headlights. The object of desire in this case seems to be someone named Evelyn. She and the speaker are flooring it through the upper midwest. They smile; they glance; they kiss; there’s a pile of money on the dashboard; there’s a wreck in the final verse. Things lead, as they do, to a chorus, and that chorus, as in any good song about desire, is baldly straightforward: “She said oh baby take me/ and I said oh baby take me too.” It isn’t Keats, but then again, Keats and Fanny Brawne never drove around in a Nissan hatchback listening to Morrissey.

It’s a truism to say that rock music would never have existed without sex, cars, death, sex in cars, death in cars, or sex and death in cars.[3] But most of the automotive-lust rock canon does a staggeringly poor job at conveying the actual fraught hesitations and discomfiting upwellings of desire that accompany the experience of being strongly attracted to someone who is sitting next to you in the very small space of a vehicle. Meatloaf, Poison, Van Halen, Elastica, R Kelly, Bob Seger—that’s a first pass at a sex-in-car rock canon, and while I like several of those songs (even the Poison one!), and am morally appalled by a couple listed artists (not just R. Kelly!), there is not much effort in those tracks to convey fraught hesitation. Springsteen at his very best can pull it off—and Big Thief singer/songwriter Adrianne Lenker has mentioned Nebraska in particular as an influence on “Shark Smile”—but Springsteen on Nebraska is, in all the best ways, an outlier.

“Shark Smile” conveys lust and hesitation far more with its instrumental tones than with its lyrics. The rhythm section in particular is insistent but gentle all at once. A fairly strummy guitar asserts and then withholds at various points before a more chaotic electric guitar line crescendos to take the end of the song towards a concluding chaos that evokes, like any tilting toward the sublime, lust and death inseparably. Lenker’s vocal performance is by turns alien and caressing, whispery and growling. She has one of those voices that is initially a bit off-putting in its lack of polish, until she sinks her hooks in and suddenly the idea of listening to rock music performed by a merely beautiful voice seems actively obscene. Put all the elements of “Shark Smile” together, and it somehow sounds to this old guy’s memory like being seventeen and driving around town, unsure of yourself and overwhelmed by yourself, with no particular place to go.

The fatal conclusion of the song is a nice bit of fragmentary melodrama. Bonnie and Clyde or Thelma and Louise come to mind, but that doesn’t quite fit inasmuch as all four of those characters die, whereas the narrator of “Shark Smile” seems to be alive to hear Evelyn’s last words (which are, of course, the chorus). In this way, “Shark Smile” riffs on the much more maudlin pop subgenre of songs about teen romance interrupted by vehicular death, headlined by the likes of “Teen Angel” and “Last Kiss.” And say what you will about “Teen Angel,” but it understands that teenage desire is so terrifying, eruptive, overwhelming, and shameful that its enormity can only find an objective correlative in the image of a sixteen-year-old girl getting hit by a mother-fucking train.

I’ve thus far avoided dwelling on the fact that “Shark Smile” is a song in which a woman sings about a woman, largely because I didn’t want to come across as suggesting that the song’s apparent queerness is what makes it interesting.[4] Indeed, its queerness doesn’t make it interesting, or at least it doesn’t make it novel—Tracy Chapman wrote a hit driving song thirty years ago. I also wanted to avoid getting all male-gazey about it. But I will hazard that Lenker’s lyrical stew of same-sex desire, outlaw imagery, and rural setting creates an air of reticence, stealth, and even dread that is echoed in the steady drone of the guitar, and also in the way that the framing dissonance of the song is at war with its catchiness.

At the end of the last sentence I talked myself into liking the intro. What can I say? It’s a very good song. Perhaps the point of close reading is to make ourselves like the things we don’t like about the things we love.

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[1] I should note that Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker, who wrote the song, says that the intro “foreshadow(s) the turmoil that happens in the song.” That’s clever, and the part of me that believes that a rock song can be an urn well-wrought as any Donne sonnet is willing to go there. However, the part of me that commutes to Warrensburg usually wishes they’d just get to the first verse already. https://www.npr.org/2017/11/26/565921721/big-thiefs-shark-smile-is-a-rocking-road-song-ending-in-tragedy

[2] One nice thing about blogging is that I don’t have to listen to the editor who would rightly insist that I remove that pun.

[3] I might be stretching the definition of “truism.”

[4] All of this is assuming that “the speaker” of the song is a woman, which is by no means a definitive reading.