Happy 20th Anniversary to Guster’s fourth studio album Keep It Together, originally released June 24, 2003.
It was August 2020. It had been a confusing and scary past couple of months with no end in sight. I’d driven to New Hampshire with two friends—masked in the car, tested beforehand, clarified our distancing procedures, because Guster had promised a show. This was my first chance to see live music in five months, and most importantly, a chance to see Guster—a band that had been with me since high school, whose music I connect to on a deeper, more sustained level than perhaps any other artist. They opened with “Keep It Together.”
Which, I’ll admit, has never been a favorite of mine. While I love a ballad, “Keep It Together” has always felt a little one-note for me, lacking the dynamics and instrumental interplay of other signature Guster ballads like “Ramona,” “Either Way,” or “Empire State.” But some songs take a year, or two, or seventeen, to find their perfect moment—and there we were, in Swanzey, New Hampshire. A band I’d trusted for my entire adult life walked on stage and told me—all of us—that we could, and had to, keep it together.
According to drummer/band historian/social media mogul Brian Rosenworcel, “Keep It Together” came into life at the end of the recording process, when Ryan Miller, the usual songwriter, was “fried.” One can’t blame Miller; there had been two long years of writing, recording, getting the album rejected by the label, and starting over as the band plotted its follow-up to 1999’s Lost and Gone Forever. Rosenworcel stepped in to write a song about the band, leaning on a Lord of the Flies allegory to describe how the band was in a strange, new stage of their career and had to turn inward, supporting and sustaining each other, to make it through strange times.
It was strange times, indeed. In their early years, Guster was two acoustic guitars and a set of hand drums. As guitarist Adam Gardner put it, the band’s instrumental limitations gave them license to step outside of traditional songwriting and arranging and toward something totally different. They perfected this approach by the end of Lost and Gone Forever, leaving them with no more mountains to climb.
Enter the quagmire of the Keep It Together era. Going “traditional” with three albums of chemistry and songwriting behind them, the band completely reinvented its sound and struck out for new directions. The results are undeniable: “Backyard,” “Diane,” “Homecoming King,” and “Careful” are a murderer’s row of breezy indie pop bangers, each one as nimble and catchy as the one that came before it. “Amsterdam” is in a league of its own, a crisp heartbreak narrative over a bouncy pop hit, whose chorus’ upward climb matches the speaker’s desperation.
Listen to the Album:
The crown jewel is “Come Downstairs and Say Hello.” The first, slower part of the track is a two-verse map of alienation, the instrumental so subdued it sounds like it’s afraid of disrupting the moping speaker. But the song veers in the second half, becoming much faster as the singer decides to get his life together. It’s a resurrection in six minutes, positioning the decision to get better as a victory in and of itself, regardless of what the eventual result is. While the slower, unredeemed half of the track uses only the band’s traditional hand percussion, the frantic rave-up in the back half uses both the hand percussion and the drum kit. The changes we must embrace don’t require us to completely throw away our old selves, and this is what makes the song, and the record, so believable: it’s still unmistakably Guster.
While Keep It Together feels like a giant pivot away from the apocalypse-in-waiting of Lost and Gone Forever, it’s not a betrayal of Guster’s identity as a band. They’d always been a feel-good group; fans threw pixie sticks on-stage during “Happy Frappy” and ping-pong balls for “Airport Song,” fans were enlisted to whistle on “All The Way Up To Heaven” for Lost and Gone Forever, and when I saw the group in Northampton a few weeks ago, they improvised a song about Ryan Miller’s pineapple suit. Keep It Together, with its warm pop sound and bright cover art, feels like Guster’s spirit.
Which is not to say that it’s unserious—recall that it was a slog to get Keep It Together made. It turns out that being oneself is not an easy thing to do, which we see on “I Hope Tomorrow Is Like Today,” effectively the final track of Keep It Together (barring the hidden track “Two at a Time”). It’s sung from the perspective of a partner who just hopes that nothing will change – that the special place that their relationship has reached will just coast forever. A well-earned crescendo and strong harmonies between Miller and guest vocalist Ben Kweller underscore both the importance and the impossibility of that happening—because bad things will inevitably come to pass.
So, jump ahead to August 2020. We tried (and failed) to honk our car horns in-time with “Do You Love Me?,” giant inflatable versions of the band members loomed over the stage, and Miller wore a bubble suit to interact with the crowd. It was still, unmistakably, a Guster show. By opening with “Keep It Together,” the band reminded us, and themselves, that that most vital and hardest thing that one can do is keep their sense of self through all of the chaos that life can bring. It took two years to make the album and seventeen years for that song to find its perfect moment, but it eventually did.
Listen: