D: Mish!

M: Dave!!

D: Blog’s looking a little sad, what do you think about one last proper post before we admit maintaining this site is no longer our passion?

M: I would love to. Any creative direction?

D: I’m thinking we can each pick a few of the other guy’s songs to say a few words about. This isn’t self-serving at all, as we’re technically writing about “each other” rather than “ourselves.”

M: I would love that, because I genuinely love so many of your songs. I will actually suffer picking just three. But maybe restraint now leaves room for an encore post at some point.

D: I’m going to start at the end, with Exchange Rates. This song is cool. It’s one of the few we workshopped from scratch as a four piece and it’s always felt like a voicemail from the one that got away, like we’d finally managed to get the portal open and snap a single clear photo before it collapsed in on itself. Lyrically it’s smart and earnest and vulnerable in ways that still make me feel things twenty years out. Sonically it’s like a Venn diagram of everything the four of us each thought was cool and were good at playing, and the juxtaposition turns what could have been a mopey dirge into a rallying cry against the middle age fadeaway. It’s the last song on one of the last recordings of our last iteration as a full band, and it will always remind me of those final LA years with you and me and Jack and Nitzan, the bittersweet nights out in Hollywood with the life we thought we wanted always just out of reach.

M: Ever the yin to your yang, I’m going to start at the beginning with Annie Dan. I remember us meeting for the first time and playing each other a few songs in my dorm room at Smiley. I don’t think Annie Dan was one of them. Later that night you slipped a burned CD under my door with “20 Dave Lowensohn tracks” (I still have that CD 25 years later). Annie Dan was on it, with that perfect little intro riff. Listening to that song was, and still is, like coming back to an old memory I’d forgotten. It’s a gem of a song, and characteristic of so many of your songs which combine specific lyrics, familiar choruses, and an extra something (in this case, the riff) that make the songs distinct. I also loved singing the high harmony in the chorus.

D: My second song is going to be an obvious one – Anodyne. One of the few we played at pretty much every show, no slide but otherwise it’s all there: easy enough to play on a dorm room guitar, a flexible enough second guitar part that we never got bored, soaring harmonies, alt rock worn shamelessly on the sleeve, an expandable midsection for when we needed to change a string or fill a three hour set, and that trademark Misha Chellam honest earnest interrogation of the void. Because we really did play it almost every time, it brings back like a decade plus of memories, which is pretty wild & different from my own songs, which I raised from babies vs. meeting as adults.

M: My second song is Santa Monica. It is characteristic of another genre of Dave Lowensohn songwriting, in which general ennui with modern life is made concrete by anchoring it in a place. I was always struck by the line “slowly getting sick from the sun,” which was foreign for me as a sun lover, but which evoked the chimera of a particular brand of LA living which had many intoxicating surfaces but also an emptiness underneath.

D: For my third song, I’m going to cheat and do two: CHBB and Balk.

Very different songs, structurally and thematically, but I loved them like Doublemint twins. They were both part of our “slide set” and similar enough that I think we took pains to keep them separated by at least a song or two, since they both had me in a chair trading fours with your verses in D major, or E major if we were traveling light and didn’t have the luxury of a third guitar.

I dunno man, those were just some of the most consistently fun songs to play over and over and over again. I figured out early on that my happiest place on earth is standing back to back with someone I trusted, swords out, fighting life’s endless hordes of faceless, semi-competent ninjas, but Speechwriters confirmed it. I’m neither a lone wolf nor a clockwatcher nor a captain of men, I’m one half of an [adjective] duo goddammit, and these songs for me were always a high water mark in how to make the absolute most of the times the other guy’s driving. I’ve tried to extend that into every group project I’ve been a part of since, and I think any successes I’ve had can be attributed to learning and internalizing this extremely zen state of active balance at a time in my life when I really needed it.

They’re also both bangers.

M: I (not surprisingly) 100% resonate with your description of enjoying partnerships. It is great to have a trusted partner to collaborate with and build stuff that is better than what you could have done on your own, but not get into the morass of co-equal triumvirates or quartets or what have you. I know people find success in those arrangements, but I like just having a cofounder and figuring out how to give and take between two people. One ~regret I have from SWLLC life is we never really experimented with writing songs together from the ground up, which likely wouldn’t have worked, but maybe would have been magic. Well, I guess we did it for that one weird TV jingle, but that’s its own special case. Anyhow, it was so great being your bandmate, because you wrote so many amazing songs.

And back on the topic of songs: my third song is Temporary States. I loved the bouncy rhythm of that song, and then the lyric-less harmonizing at the end. It was always one that I looked forward to in the setlist, to see if we could lock in for those few bars at the end and sing perfect melody / harmony lines.

D: Yeah. An embarrassment of riches, really.

Thanks for joining us on this trip down memory lane, everyone. We wouldn’t exist without you, and hopefully we’ve made the case for extremely intermittent blogging by adults.