One of the things I really like about The Weakerthans is that their music sort of sounds like the kind of poetry we all had to read in high school literature classes. I know, you think it sucked. But I loved it. There’s something powerful about a terse arrangement of words that you have to actually think about to figure out the meaning, and my meaning might not be your meaning, might not be the author’s meaning.
I could go on about why I think many of the literature classes I took sucked. Really, that’s what sucked. Not the poetry. Whenever we were in a class where we were carefully deconstructing something to figure out what the meaning was, it just felt kind of like dissecting something in biology class to me. Not to say you can’t examine the written word closely, but I’d consider it more akin to fMRI than surgery. (fMRI is when they use an MRI machine to look at an actual, operating human brain to see what’s going on while it’s running and reacting to things. They don’t get as clear a picture of the brain, but they get a better idea of what it actually does.)
All of this is my long-winded way of introducing the video of Night Windows, based on the Edward Hopper painting of the same name. You might remember Hopper as the artist who painted Nighthawks, which gets parodied a lot. Great light in his paintings.
Anyway, I’ll shut up now so you can listen.
GapPage 
