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150 Favorite Songs: #96, “Constructive Summer,” The Hold Steady (2008)
So much of what “Constructive Summer” means to me is tied into the time I found it. Those were not my happiest days, those months early in 2008. We were paying many thousands of dollars a month to live in Zone 3 London and I had no one to hang out with and I had just started receiving rejections to the query letters I’d been sending regarding the novel I’d recently completed. Not rejections of the novel, mind you — no one actually wanted to read the book to tell me they weren’t interested. They were rejecting the idea of having me send them the first fifty pages. I had just learned that all of the writing and performing I had spent the years prior doing — touring the country reading and publishing poems, and making zines and basically just saying yes to every opportunity that I could find with the expectation that I’d come out of it with something new to say — none of that shit counted, in the eyes of the editors and agents I was trying to reach. That was like falling hard on your keys.
(It’s also, quite directly, what led me to pursue journalism seriously — I realized that no one would read the book if I had no credentials, and that the things I had thought were my credentials were actually not interesting to anyone. I set out a goal to get published in four or five reputable outlets, all of which would improve my resume to the point I could get people to reject the book after reading it, rather than before. The first outlet on my list was The A.V. Club, which worked really well. The others, like McSweeney’s and Tin House, I haven’t really thought about in a long time, but I suspect I might have enough of a resume at this point that the rejections would be based on the work itself. And rejections they would be, as time, a beneficial creative writing group, and subsequent re-readings of the text have assured me that the book was not publishable in its 2008 form. But I digress!)
Anyway. Through all of that, there were two songs that I found that felt very much like the friends I wished I’d made in London. One of them, “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror” by Jeffrey Lewis, appears (quite high) on this list. The other is “Constructive Summer.” I’d never really cared for the Hold Steady before they released the album this song opens, Stay Positive. After listening to it, though, I really felt like I was less alone. This is what music is good for when you are a teenager, and it is what music can do — less often, but still sometimes — even when you are a grown-up. When it happens now, it feels so much more valuable, based on its scarcity.
The first line — “Me and my friends are like / the drums on ‘Lust For Life’” — hit me square in my expat isolation. I really missed my friends. It goes on to get all Springsteen-y, about working in a mill and drinking with your buddies on water towers, but then that chorus rolls in — “We’re gonna build something this summer,” is all it says — and it sounds so inspiring when you put it that way. Just build something. Together. It’s not a grand ambition, not specific, not even based in having completed it — it’s just about building. Where I was at in 2008, when I first heard this song, that was a really important concept.
There are others, too. “Let this be my annual reminder that we can all be something bigger.” “Getting older makes it harder to remember / we are our only savior.” “Raise a toast to Saint Joe Strummer.” All of these lines that felt ripped from my notebook. It took me a long time to understand how I felt about the second half of that year in London, to figure out the ways it changed me that I never noticed at the time. And it’s a little weird, by the time you’re in your late twenties, to attribute some of that change to a song. But when I think about being in that tiny flat on Hornsey Road above the Costcutter, I’m usually sitting at the table typing, headphones on so I don’t wake Kat, listening to this song and planning what it is I’m going to build.
