Paul Westerberg
Paul Westerberg is probably not going to make the album that some of us have been waiting for since whenever you think his last great record was. (Pleased To Meet Me if you’re being honest, All Shook Down if you’re being generous, 14 Songs if you’re me.) And there’s a reason for that. His burning subject was the anxiety of growing up, the ache of adolescence, the resistance to maturity and responsibility. That’s a hard act to sustain for a man who seems to have settled into comfortable middle age.
So take for granted that 49:00 is not a great Paul Westerberg album. But it’s a good one. That he sold it online for 49 cents is obviously no guarantee of quality, but I count at least triple my money’s worth of fun. Its deliberately sloppy single-track format a continuous and careless 44-minute (despite its title) mix of songs, scraps and tossed-off covers is, conceptually, his most punk-rock move since that notorious Replacements live cassette.
Assorted fans have cobbled together track lists with approximated titles, but minute/second markers seem more in the spirit of the thing. The first song (0:00), where he interrupts some poor girl’s wedding, could be a sequel to “Kiss Me On The Bus”; the honky-tonk prison shuffle (10:48) has a pleasantly Hootenanny-ish vibe; the one where he brags that “everyone’s stupid in my family” (18:21) has a stupidly catchy hook that he probably stole from somebody.
There’s also a funereal farewell (22:13) over an arpeggiated guitar progression that’s one of the prettiest things he’s done in a while. It all builds up to a heartfelt Partridge Family anthem (41:10) and a handclap fuzzbox finale (42:10) with a lot of “Oh yeah” in it. At one point (39:02) he sings, “I’m on the brink today of writing something memorable.” For 49 cents, being on the brink is close enough.
Editor’s note: The album was pulled from download distribution not long after its midsummer release, apparently because its use of mashups or snippets from other artists’ work created legal concerns. Clips of three original songs are available on YouTube: