Happy 20th Anniversary to The Jayhawks’ sixth studio album Smile, originally released May 9, 2000.
I love a weird album.
Not in the sense that I love albums that are particularly experimental or cutting-edge, although I like those too, sometimes. Rather, I like when a band puts out an album that makes an artist’s discography a very easy game of one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other. Most of the time, the weird album is a commitment to artistry—it says that rather than churning out another thing that sounds like the old stuff because a group knows it’ll sell records, they’re going to take a risk with a thing that the fanbase might not like…and might even be bad.
And a lot of the time, the weird album is, in fact, bad. Sometimes, it gets forgotten by history, as the album we don’t talk about, the album from which no songs get played at concerts. We don’t like this kind of weird album (although the sentiment behind the risk is still nice). The probability of a weird album being bad is actually kind of high because the musicians are out of their comfort zone, which of course makes the good weird albums so rewarding.
The Jayhawks spent most of their career pioneering alt-country. Their first two records are more country than they are alt, featuring a particularly Minnesotan twang. The follow-ups—two ‘90s albums replete with rock-solid songwriting (1992’s Hollywood Town Hall and 1995’s Tomorrow The Green Grass)—mark the group’s first permutation away from straight country, combining the vocal harmonies offered by Gary Louris and Mark Olson with more distorted guitars and an instrumentation that backed away from the uptempo shuffles found on the early records.
We had our second permutation away from that original aesthetic with Sound of Lies (1997), recorded in the wake of Olson’s departure the previous year. Without Olson, Sound of Lies takes a more straightforward rock approach than even those ‘90s records did, but lacks the unified sense of identity that had characterized Hollywood Town Hall and Tomorrow the Green Grass. Olson’s departure seems to have unseated the band, leading to a different, but safe, effort.
Enter Smile (2000), which would go much further than Sound of Lies and enthusiastically claim the weird album title within the Jayhawks’ discography. With Bob Ezrin producing, the band creates something that’s shaggy and dynamic, filled with catchy hooks that pull listeners in but also a complex instrumentation that rewards those who stick around and linger.
The difference between Sound of Lies and Smile is that the earlier record seems to treat the move away from country as a subtractive process. It seems that moving to rock allowed for a more neutral sound, something with less personality. Smile leans on the mainstream rock playbook in a way that builds new sounds and brings the band somewhere they had not been before, rather than presenting the loss of Olson as a loss of a particular flavor. Suddenly and manically, the Jayhawks reinvent themselves for exactly one record.
Let’s look at “Somewhere In Ohio,” which opens with, of all things, a drum machine. After a fairly straightforward verse and a delightfully hooky chorus, we get a feedback-soaked verse, with an electric guitar that leaks atonality over much of the rest of the song, breaking only for some massive chords in the chorus and a five-note solo at the end of the instrumental break. Not only is this kind of noise unexpected in a Jayhawks song, it also completely unseats the joyful optimism embedded in the vocal harmony and melody, supporting the doom-ridden “Look out Joe, I think the sky is falling” lyric. To make matters stranger, the following track, “A Break In The Clouds” opens with a soft, emotional, a cappella vocal from Louris, effectively evaporating the tension from “Ohio,” replacing it with yearning.
That’s quite a lot, and it’s only one track (and a little bit of the next one). Smile oozes with a sort of unpredictability. The first seconds of the title track call on a strange passing of responsibility between guitar, piano, and vocals. “Baby, Baby, Baby” is perhaps the heaviest tune the Jayhawks have ever put on record, with an uncharacteristic Jesus reference in the coda. The instrumental break in “Pretty Thing” is mostly open space, with no clear lead part emerging until more than thirty seconds after a somewhat unsettling, minimalist guitar part takes hold. “Broken Harpoon,” a great acoustic track, is backed by an atypical string section.
The pivot to a bigger rock sound also means a narrative shift away from the more parochial early records that feel like they all take place in very small towns. On Smile, the characters seem unseated or transient (see “What Led Me To This Town” or the cast of characters in the delightful “Mr. Wilson”) rather than part of the sustained relationships or places like they are in “Miss Williams’ Guitar” or “Martin’s Song.” Unlike pretty much every other Jayhawks record, you can’t quite place Smile in a physical place.
Perhaps most befuddling of all is that Smile doesn’t walk around like a weird album. It’s probably the most fun record The Jayhawks ever put out—and a marked difference from its follow-up, the somber and beautiful Rainy Day Music (2003). This isn’t Wilco putting out A Ghost is Born (2004); Smile doesn’t seem to want you to notice how weird it is. It’d much rather you groove along to “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” or “Queen of the World” than have you think “what the hell are they doing?”
While anyone who’s heard Blue Earth (1989) would be surprised that Smile was made by the same band—they might not notice all of the sleight of hand and bizarre pivots that make up this surprisingly cohesive piece. The Jayhawks are still their old humble selves even though they put out something completely wild, which is what makes it the perfect weird album for them.
LISTEN: