about the album: “the monitor”

Tomorrow sees the release of The Monitor, the eagerly-anticipated concept record from Titus Andronicus. Using the overarching metaphor of the Civil War to discuss feelings of emotional isolation, conflict of identity and personal heartbreak, Patrick Stickles has created a fascinating, flummoxing record that invites deconstruction by refusing easy answers. We had Matthew Fritch talk to Stickles for an About the Album feature for eMusic, and we thought we’d give you an early look at it here.

After the jump, Stickles talks Lincoln’s depression, the Glen Rock Inn, and the importance of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

There are two wars being fought in the belly of The Monitor, the labyrinthine concept album by the brass-balled and well-read New Jersey punks in Titus Andronicus. One of the wars is Civil—as in 1861-1865—and the other is, well, more difficult to define. It takes place in the psyche of frontman Patrick Stickles, the narrator and protagonist of a plot so twisted with historical references (the album takes its title from the name of an ironclad Union battleship) and knotted with unbridled emotion (“I’m at the end of my rope, and I feel like swinging,” Stickles gasps on “A Pot In Which To Piss”) that it’s nearly impossible to untangle.

Yet even a cursory listen to The Monitor yields clues everywhere: in the back-to-back paraphrasing of famous lyrics by Bruce Springsteen and Billy Bragg on opener “A More Perfect Union”; and in the Ken Burns-style readings of passages by Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. It would all fall flat if not for Titus Andronicus’ spirited sound, triangulated somewhere between the blue-collar anthems of fellow New Jerseyans the Gaslight Anthem, the stadium-rock narratives of the Hold Steady and the cathartic vocal delivery of Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst. For Titus Andronicus, reference points aren’t a sin—they’re signposts for a band that just wants to be understood while they rally you ’round their flag.

eMusic convinced Stickles to play tour guide and psychoanalyst with regard to The Monitor.

On the Billy Bragg-inspired lyric “I never wanted to change the world/ but I’m looking for a new New Jersey”:
The magical thing about Billy Bragg is that even though a lot of his songs are very specific about certain causes—whether he’s singing about a miners’ strike or labor unions—the spirit behind them is very palpable and universal. “A New England” is a song about love and sexual frustration, but it’s very aware of the world around it. In trying to invoke the spirit of Billy Bragg, it was in the hope that people who didn’t agree with our agenda would still be pumped up.

On “A More Perfect Union”:
The song is based on me moving up to Boston when I got out of college. I went because my girlfriend at the time went to school up there and got a job. We spent most of our first record (2008′s The Airing of Grievances) talking about how stifling it is in New Jersey to punk types, and I figured that Boston, with its great history of fighting for freedom and democracy, would be more of an ideological haven than New Jersey was. So our hero has some friends in Boston and a romantic relationship and things are looking up, but he quickly discovers that a distance of 200 miles doesn’t mean that people aren’t the same, for better or worse. At this point in the story, for worse.

On “Titus Andronicus Forever”:
This song sets up the following one. I lifted that device from the rhetorical style of Abraham Lincoln, who’s an important guy on the record. He would spend the bulk of a paragraph saying something in a flowery, circuitous way, then sum it up very concisely at the end to create an epiphany of sorts for the listener. Say it fancy, then say it plain. So I set up the idea of our hero getting away from stuff he doesn’t like and doesn’t agree with but finds out that the enemy is everywhere.

On the depression of Abraham Lincoln:
The last president we had who acknowledged he was a human being was Jimmy Carter, and look what happened to him. He never said anything like what Lincoln said in that famous letter to Mr. Stuart (“I am now the most miserable man living…”). That’s what makes him so fascinating to me. We think of him as this giant—literally, he was six foot four, our tallest president—who’s deified in our culture, but the way he was so willing to admit his weaknesses make him an exponentially more compelling figure. Lincoln’s life is just an enormous triumph of the human spirit, a truly American story. We don’t try to shy away from our miseries, but at the same time we don’t make that an excuse to not do our best and rock as hard as possible.

On “No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future”:
Another one of the themes of the record is emotional anesthetization. Most people seem to agree that it’s easier not to feel much of anything rather than acknowledge they are emotional creatures. Even though things are hard, it’s better to embrace all our weaknesses and imperfections and celebrate them rather than feel shame about them. I wrote this song during my senior year of college. My college years were an extremely depressing period of my life, and I decided to start taking antidepressants in order not to feel so down on myself all the time. I immediately felt better, but it got me thinking about the nature of feelings, and whether or not I could ever validate my feelings, if they were anything more than chemical reactions. I felt conflicted about breaking my promise to myself to embrace my feelings. That’s why I sing, “I took the one thing that made me beautiful and I threw it away.”

On the importance of Curb Your Enthusiasm:
Curb informed our methodology for recording the album. Just like Larry David, we got our most talented friends (members of Wye Oak, Vivian Girls, the Hold Steady and others) to get together and told them to help us get from Point A to Point B. And our first record contained a lot of references to Seinfeld, so it was fitting that our second record would have a little bit of an homage to Curb, Larry David’s great sophomore effort.

On the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn reading Walt Whitman on “A Pot In Which To Piss”:
[The Hold Steady's] Separation Sunday is one of my favorite albums. The story in Separation Sunday is easier to follow than The Monitor. The Hold Steady really exemplify the ability to make a collection of songs that can stand alone as singles but become stronger when you contextualize them. That was definitely a quality I hoped our record would have.

On Civil Wars and Culture Wars:
The Civil War theme is super relevant to today. We were taught as kids that the Civil War was fought to end all kinds of divisions. But sometimes I think all it actually did was teach those wicked things to be more insidious and subtler … Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, even though they were in opposition, admitted a respect for each other. When I read stuff from that period, it seems like people had more open minds, bigger hearts back then. But maybe that’s me being a Luddite or a romantic about that stuff. Maybe they were the same dopes that they are now.

On “Richard II”:
The subtitle is “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” which is the name of a book in another book, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Most people are reasonably mild-mannered these days, but it doesn’t mean we don’t have little fiery balls of hate inside of us. As soon as you can gather a couple hundred people who have the same wicked ideas that you do, that gives people license to indulge their most horrible impulses. I was thinking of the Conscription Riots of 1862; the Irish immigrants were scared that, if slavery were abolished, black people would come in and take their jobs. They wanted to keep their spot at the bottom of the food chain, and it compelled them to do shocking, unspeakable things like burning down an orphanage. Also in the song we talk a little bit about John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, in which [abolitionist raider] Dangerfield Newby was killed and lay in ditch all day; his ears were cut off as souvenirs and [U.S. soldiers] senselessly discharged rifles into his corpse. His remains were last seen being eaten by a pack of roving pigs.

On the album’s backdrop of violence—war, hanging, strangling, etc.:
I’ve never even punched a guy in the face.

On “Theme From ‘Cheers’”:
It’s about a bar in my hometown of Glen Rock called the Glen Rock Inn. Back when I was in college, my dad and I used to go there on the weekends. Even though the TV show Cheers is a sterilized version of bar culture, that theme song hit on why people love their neighborhood bars so much. Sometimes you really do want to go where everybody knows your name. The song ties into the theme of running away from your problems and trying to find any solution besides accountability.

On “The Battle Of Hampton Roads”:
Our hero has just spent 50 minutes taking the hard line, being militant and saying everyone sucks. In the first song he was saying, “I’m gonna kick everyone’s ass and stand up for what’s right” and all that stuff. At the end, he doesn’t feel much better about himself. He’s not an especially happy guy but he’s able to define himself by absence, to borrow a phrase from postmodernism. He doesn’t know what he stands for, but he knows what he can be opposed to. He realizes that if he’d succeeded in killing all the bad guys, where would he go from there? His life would be purposeless. It ends with us pleading with the enemy to stay with us forever, lest our lives be completely meaningless. For all that bellyaching, he’s really no better than the people he’s been yelling at.

In the actual Battle of Hampton Roads, nobody won. The [Confederate battleship] Virginia got blown up by its own crew. Rather than surrendering, they opted to blow it up—maritime suicide, if you will. And the Monitor just sunk somewhere off the coast of North Carolina with no fanfare whatsoever—it sank during a storm. Go figure. These two terribly beautiful warmaking machines, the best from each side, couldn’t kill each other so they just killed themselves. Kind of an apt metaphor.