Then it’s back to songs about Zach, both thrashing (the aforementioned “Where Are You Tonight”) and controlled (“Dreaming The Lie”), before Bob lurches into “Weight Of The World”, a rather perverse pop song that spews a litany of real-life problems, especially a father’s distress over the inability to visit a far-off son. While Carroll’s guitar snarls and slices through the narrative, the storyline moves from frustration to suicide: “The ache in the heart and the blood and the marrow/The taste of the metal as I suck on the barrel and squeeze.”
“It’s a very honest song, and I don’t like the character in that song,” Bob said. “He’s a whiny, give-up loser who ends it all because he can’t deal with it. I’m not condoning that action, and I don’t agree with it. Shoulder it, motherfucker!
“As a songwriter, I want to test people’s level of comfort. Because if you don’t, it’s just boring. If they go, ‘Gee, I don’t know what I think about that,’ that’s what you’re supposed to do.”
Moorer has seen Bob do that to people more than a few times, noting that usually their eyes bug a bit, their hair kind of blows back, and then they start listening harder.
“Butch [her husband] and I have talked about this a lot,” she said. “Sometimes Bob reminds us both of Kris Kristofferson. One of the most brilliant lines I’ve ever heard is in ‘In The Time I Have Left’, where he says ‘The battles I have fought have left me alive, but alone.’ I’ve never heard it put like that, that condition of going through relationships and surviving heartbreak and being a strong person and getting through it, but you look around and you don’t have anything but your stoicism and your pride. He took a nail and hit it with a hammer, and there it is in the wall.”
In loving memory of Zachary N. Chaney
8/10/79 4/14/98
— dedication within Things Change, by Lonesome Bob
Bob,
To a really nice kid. Thanks for all your parties…Be good & please never, ever change.
Love,
Barb
(as written in Le Souvenir)
Whether passive music listeners, or even active music listeners, want to hear all that hammer-pounding is another thing, entirely. Rigby notes that Bob won’t stoop to please — that “we’ve got to either come up to his level or else just miss out.”
To be clear, Things Change is not some album-length funeral service. It’s more layered than that, it’s funny at times and smart throughout, and it’s sequenced so you can skip over the deep-and-sinking-deeper middle section if you desire. The first four songs and the final four songs (counting the hidden track “Patches”) are thoughtful but not discomforting.
And though Lonesome Bob is quick to lay the “I can’t worry about what the audience is thinking” card on the table, he’s well aware that few among us want to experience such anguish every day. Even without “Where Are You Tonight?” and “Weight Of The World”, Things Change rocks and twangs, offers melodies and hooks and other things good music is supposed to provide. Plus, as Tim Carroll reminds, “Bob has cool lyrics.”
But Carroll also says Bob “wears his heart on his art,” and Things Change would not have been released had the artist not felt that it honored Zach appropriately. Open the jewel case, pull the disc from its holder, and you’ll see a photograph of Zach sitting in an orange chair, wearing a sweatshirt, a ridiculous scruff of chin hair and a smile.
Then put the disc in your CD player, and you won’t write a damn word. I’ll tell you that right now.
Peter Cooper lives in Nashville and writes about music for The Tennessean newspaper. He is nearly as tall as Bob, though not as powerful. Cooper’s good buddy, Baker Maultsby of Spartanburg, South Carolina, contributed to this article.
