Everclear.
Yes. Everclear.
In case you didn’t get it: Everclear.
I feel like talking about Everclear in the context of things getting “ruined” might feel a bit too obvious to audiences of a certain persuasion but they’ve been on my mind a lot. In fact, they’ve been on my mind since I heard them last year on a road trip with a friend of mine where we drove out to Syracuse just to see what was out that way and he brought along his copies of Sparkle and Fade and Songs From An American Movie Vol. 2.
Up until that point my impression of the band came from “I Will Buy You A New Life” and even then I was still skeptical about this band featuring a doofy-looking older guy whose blonde hair felt way too out-of-place with the rest of his whole vibe. Come the end of that road trip I found myself listening to as much Everclear as I possibly could.
Just one thing though; most of Everclear’s musical and historical canon stops dead in its tracks around 2004 with the postscript of “they transitioned to being a mostly touring act who occasionally records.”
So yes they had recorded new material but it was all with the general vibe of “I don’t recommend listening to it.” Something about that felt off, and I couldn’t place why it did. It wasn’t until I started working on these articles and spoke with a friend about what to do after the Radioactive piece and the crossroads I was at; write about this album that is being read right now, or write about something whose aftermath was disastrous due to critical trashing that was so bad it’s often called one of the worst albums of all time.
My friend said, “I know Everclear for ‘Father of Mine’ and I’d honestly like to know why I don’t know more of their songs.”
Fine, I’ll take it. You’ll find out what the other album is next month.
Anyway, back to Everclear.
Everclear’s story is not a pretty one but somewhat shockingly it’s also barely a well-documented one. Sure there’s interviews with band founder and singer-songwriter Art Alexakis, but to dig into the history of the group all I could really find that talks more extensively about them were a series of oral histories from the Willamette Week website, which I’d honestly suggest checking out if it’s what you’re into. What the fuck, man? These guys had one of the biggest albums of the 90s, how are they not getting more love or at least the benefit of archiving? I digress. In both these oral history articles though I found myself overwhelmed with two underlying and recurring themes; Art Alexakis is an asshole, and the city of Portland, Oregon does not like Art Alexakis or Everclear by extension, both for a whole variety of reasons. I will not be getting too deep into the anti-Art sentiments, but I will touch upon them because unfortunately they do inform a large chunk of this story.
The year is 1998. Everclear, consisting of the previously mentioned founder and main songwriter Art Alexakis, bassist Craig Montoya, and drummer Greg Eklund decide to take a break following the success of their album So Much For The Afterglow alongside the growing tensions between the band members. Within the next 2 years Art Alexakis would go on to do some solo shows and eventually start working on what was originally supposed to be a solo album featuring the touring members of Everclear backing him up.
Eventually following unsatisfactory sessions, the main lineup of Everclear is brought in and the solo album is reworked as an Everclear album. That album would be titled Songs From An American Movie Vol. 1: Learning How To Smile and it would go on to go platinum as well as reach #9 on the Billboard albums chart, though it would also sell half of what Afterglow sold, raising minor red flags, but it still sold platinum so that’s not bad, right?
It gets worse.
Remember when I mentioned that they made a Vol.2? That came out in November 2000, four months after Vol. 1. The important thing to remember is that this was done at the insistence of Alexakis, who wanted to put out both albums to highlight the two different styles of the group. This resulted in mass confusion and overexposure of Everclear because even just a few months before Vol.2 was set to release there were still singles from Vol.1 that were just hitting the radio, which meant promoters, DJs, and the record-buying audience were all confused as to which album was being promoted and which singles paired up with which album. As a result of this mass confusion Vol.2 only sold upwards of 250k copies and was only certified gold in Canada. When both American Movie albums failed to gain more traction the band took another break after what would’ve been their first tour of the UK since 1998 got cancelled.
The band as a whole would remain inactive for the rest of 2001 while Art Alexakis would go on a 12-date solo tour in 2002 before reconvening with the other two pieces of Everclear to record their sixth album Slow Motion Daydream. The band worked and prodded away at the album and at one point presented a version of it to the head of Capitol Records before they would go back and record a few other songs, all of which would get included on the new album while others got scrapped.
What happens next I can’t 100% confirm though it wouldn’t surprise me if it turned out to be true, the only spot I’ve read this in was Wikipedia and the only other source that could even vaguely confirm this was the Daily Eastern News, but the release of Slow Motion Daydream had a tough road ahead of it.
You see, it had a lot to do with 9/11.
No that is not an edgy joke. It had a lot to do with 9/11.
In the promotional lead-up to the album Capitol Records had their eyes set on the perfect lead-off single; “The New York Times.” It’s a “state of the world” song but it has strong undertone about the sadness Art Alexakis felt reading and hearing about the news of the September 11th, 2001 attacks that happened just a year beforehand.
“That’s not a song about one specific thing. It ties in the economy, the election of 2000, 9/11 of course – you can’t write music and not be effected by 9/11 – the abduction of Laci Peterson.”
-Art Alexakis, SongFacts interview 2003
So it’s definitely more of a “state of the world” song but 9/11 is absolutely a major part of the inspiration and it radiates from the song. Capitol felt that radiation and felt it would be the strongest first impression of Slow Motion Daydream. I personally agree, it’s a pretty song with a strong set of lyrics and though Everclear were never really much of a “ballad” band, they absolutely nailed it here.
The lyrics in particular become more poignant when you think about what’s happened in the 20+ years since that horrific day, especially when Art sings
“When I think about what happened it just makes me crazy. When I close my eyes you seem so alive. I really think about you I want to believe we can make things right”
-Everclear, “The New York Times.”
I don’t believe we ever truly “made things right” and it makes me want to go give 2002/2003 Art Alexakis a hug.
Okay, so Capitol Records wants to make this the first single, it seems like a no-brainer, right?
Art had other plans.
You see, during this solo tour he did in 2002 he had premiered a new song off the upcoming record which had gotten an abundance of positive audience reception and was eventually recorded for Slow Motion Daydream. He believed in this song and he fought tooth and nail to make it the first single off the album. Eventually Capitol wavered and went with the song Alexakis chose as the lead-off single.
Let’s hear what Art was willing to live and die by.
…you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.
THIS was what Art Alexakis was willing to fight Capitol over.
…actually, I think this is okay. I THINK.
“Volvo Driving Soccer Mom” would become the lead-off single on January 14th, 2003. Makes sense as a lead single, it shows that Everclear have a bit of a sarcastic snarky side to them.
“Yeah, I used to be a dancer at the local strip club,
But now I know my right wing from my wrong.”
“I know I used to be a real wild child,
But now I am a Volvo-driving soccer mom.”
-Everclear “Volvo Driving Soccer Mom” (2003)
…but then you go and read interviews or hear what Art has to say and it feels like the exact opposite of what the song is about.
“This is a song about definitions, about being defined by people, allowing yourself to be defined by other people’s standards. It’s very junior-high to be able to say ‘that person’s this, that person’s a slut, that person’s that.’ It’s understandable in junior high school, it’s just unacceptable in your 20s, 30s, and 40s. People doing it is not right, so it’s kind of poking fun at them and people who allow it to happen to them.”
-Art Alexakis, 2003 SongFacts interview
…is it though? Is it really poking fun at them?
Don’t get me wrong, I personally believe it’s a perfectly fine song, but maybe don’t go singing stuff like this on the bridge…
“where do all the porn stars go when the lights go down?
I wonder where all the porn stars go,
Cause when you need one, they are never around.
I think they moved out to the suburbs,
And now they’re blond, bland, middle-class Republican wives.
They’ve got blond, bland, middle-class Republican children,
And blond, bland, middle-class Republican lives.
Where do all the porn stars go when the lights go down?
I think I know where all the porn stars go?
They all become Volvo-driving soccer moms.”
-Everclear, “Volvo Driving Soccer Mom” (2003)
…and then turn around and say “oh this is about not judging others.”
Anyway, this became the lead single and after that Capitol stopped promoting the album and single almost immediately. “The New York Times” would go on to become the album’s second single later on in the year but by that point the damage had certainly been done. We’ll get to that later.
Is the album itself bad? Let’s give it a proper listen.
It’s March 11th, 2003, you run out and grab the new Everclear CD, you pop it in your stereo, and this is what opens up the journey you’re about to take.
…okay, those opening guitars are ripping off “I Will Buy You A New Life” pretty hard there.
It’s actually somewhat insulting, but if you can look past that you’ve got a pretty okay opening track which immediately goes into the next song, “Blackjack.” For those not in the know, “Scary John” is a reference to John Ashcroft, whom at the time was the US Attorney General for the Bush administration and was a major supporter of the USA Patriot Act which has been controversial almost from the get-go for a whole pile of reasons I’m not going to get into here. For those not in the know about what a “blackjack” is, it’s not referring to the card game, rather a club that primarily is used to beat people up and crack their skulls open. The lyrics prominently featuring the phrase “American dream” in them which doesn’t make it an inherently political song despite the idea that Alexakis thinks it does. The music is pretty cool, though. The heavier guitars didn’t work so much on American Movie Vol.2 when Everclear kinda sounded like every bro-metal band from the mid-00s but here they absolutely work, especially with the guitars sounding like how a good cathartic punch feels.
After that we get the best song on the album, “I Want to Die a Beautiful Death.” Pretty early on in their careers Everclear got plenty of comparisons to Nirvana and while “Santa Monica” isn’t too far off from Kurt Cobain’s worldview and the type of music he made, Art Alexakis was no Kurt Cobain which was fine because Everclear tended to their own direction and kept their eyes on their own work. On “I Want to Die a Beautiful Death” he channels Kurt’s jaded view of the world in an almost uncomfortably perfect way as he sings “I don’t care, I just want to die pretty” before a sea of guitars and fuzz swarm in over the chorus. It’s an oddly optimistic take on the idea of “dying young so you can leave a pretty corpse.”
“Volvo Driving Soccer Mom” comes after that, and we know how that sounds already.
“Science Fiction” is up next. It’s alright, I guess. It’s not bad, but it’s not particularly great. I don’t have much to say about it aside from “I wouldn’t skip it if it came on shuffle.”
What’s after that? “New Blue Champion,” and though it definitely reminds me a little bit of some of those dude-rock ballads like the ones Nickelback made back in the day, where this rises above those generic ballads is that Art Alexakis has a way with words. It’s truly and genuinely his strongest point as an artist, in part because he had at least 5+ years on many of his contemporaries in terms of age, and with that added age came some added wisdom. Go crack open the lyrics to anything from the Capitol years and more than likely you’re gonna find either a really good character story, inspirational lines about a better life being on the horizon, or something that will pull at your heartstrings more than you’d probably expect.
“TV Show” follows that. A few people have pointed out that the lead vocal melody sounds more than just a little bit like “I Will Buy You A New Life,” which is the second time a song on this album has done that and it brings up what one of Everclear’s weaknesses was on this album; most of the album sounds like it’s just trying to rip off earlier Everclear songs… and look, I get it, you write how you write and everyone has their signature quirks as a writer, but whether he knows it or is only doing it subconsciously Art Alexakis is absolutely trying to rip off his earlier material and repackage it as new Everclear songs.
“Chrysanthemum” come up after that and uhhh… did we really need this song? It’s a 98-second song and it feels as if it goes almost absolutely nowhere. It might sound harsh but I’ll explain why in a little bit.
After that it’s “Sunshine (That Acid Summer)” where the album ultimately gets its name from.
“You twist and turn in a slow motion day dream
You twist and turn in your own sweet hell”
-Everclear, “Sunshine (That Acid Summer)” (2003)
This just feels like a leftover from American Movie Vol.1 that also features Art looking back on his past and wishing he could go back to “the old days,” whatever those may be while also adding a bit of bittersweet vibes in the lyrics. I can’t really say much else about this song, it tries to go for this psychedelic grunge thing that doesn’t fully work because there isn’t much of a strong hook to go with the song.
Up next we get “A Beautiful Life,” another one of my favorites off Slow Motion Daydream. It features some of those sublime Alexakis vocals while the music oh-so beautifully builds up into a perfect crescendo. My favorite part, personally, is how well the band works with the backing orchestra that plays alongside them on the track while Art’s lyrics can be perfectly be summed up with…
“I don’t care where we go
I don’t care what we do
As long as I can be with you”
-Everclear, “A Beautiful Life” (2003)
…but it also shows one of the flaws in the song. Even when it’s a love song and talking about you, it’s really about what Art wants.
That type of complaint aside, it’s the sort of song that gives the album a second wind before it crashes into “The New York Times” and ends the album proper.
That one-two punch is my favorite part of the record, but also annoys me because of one thing; it’s how the album ends if you don’t count the hidden track “White Noise.” I don’t. “A Beautiful Life” and “The New York Times” feel like the rewards for sitting through an exceptionally slumpy middle of the album and could’ve been the start of a run where the album gets better, but alas that’s it.
The band recorded a few other songs that didn’t make it onto the album; “The New Disease,” “Happy” and “Sex With A Movie Star (The Good Witch Gone Bad).” Maybe I’m just a really bitter critic but if “The New Disease” and “Sex With A Movie Star” had been included on the album or replaced a couple of the nondescript songs it would’ve made for a stronger record. It might have even been one of Everclear’s better records. As it stands “Sex With A Movie Star” is one of my favorite Everclear songs, and it was relegated to being included on a greatest hits package.
My biggest complaint ultimately about this album is that the middle feels like it shouldn’t be there at all. The album is only 40-something minutes long and roughly 15 of those minutes are spent on songs that bog the record down more than anything, and at 11 tracks, only about six songs being really “worth” the listen seems to suggest the band was much more interested in shitting something out and calling it a day. I wish I could be more harsh on this album but that would mean putting more effort into criticizing it than they put into writing it.
Alright, that’s the album. So how did Slow Motion Daydream “ruin” Everclear?
Simple.
Most reviews of the album were particularly lukewarm if not outright negative, currently holding a 57/100 rating on Metacritic. The harshest review came courtesy of Stylus, and this particularly melodramatic but damning bit of journalism.
“Each successive album has just added to the pile of disappointments. Miserable radio-ready singles, generic hard rock, the same damn melodies showing up on every record. Now, it’s all over, and this review is my farewell to a band who played an important role in my formative years. This is it, the last time I’ll willingly listen to an Everclear record — it’s finally sunk in that they’ll never be returning to the youthful exuberance of old.”
-Ed Howard, Stylus, 2001
It nails the downfall of Everclear almost perfectly.
For whatever it’s worth though a lot of fans now seem to like the album, but it’s mostly in the context of “well it’s not that bad,” or “the middle kinda lacks a bit but there’s still strong stuff on there,” and with that I fully agree, it’s just an album that never quite lived up to the potential it had artistically.
Unfortunately the album didn’t live up to commercial standards though. When Capitol stopped putting in the effort to promote the album due to the head-butting between them and Alexakis the sales numbers ended up looking pretty sad. As of now it has only sold roughly 105k+ copies, and even though it peaked at #33 on the Billboard Hot 100 it pretty much dropped off the charts immediately afterward. “Volvo Driving Soccer Mom” hit #30 on the US Alternative Chart but that would be the last Everclear single to do any sort of charting until 2015. When I say they tanked I mean they taaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanked.
The final nails in the coffin were that five months after the release of the record, in August of 2003, Greg Eklund and Craig Montoya both split from Everclear before Art left Capitol Records altogether a year later. Art would call the breakup a “mutual decision” and there seems to be no reunion in sight but all involved parties seem alright with that. Art would reform the band with a whole new lineup and release Welcome To The Drama Club in 2006, The Vegas Years in 2008, a covers album, and In A Different Light in 2009 where he rerecorded many of Everclear’s greatest hits before doing that trick again with Return to Santa Monica. Of course there has been new material in the form of the Invisible Stars and Black Is The New Black albums, but they’re nothing particularly interesting to write home about.
In the immediate time after the most commercially successful lineup split, Art went through a divorce and a bankruptcy It’s a lot to go through for any person and I say that from a point of experience.
Looking back on Slow Motion Daydream, Art doesn’t seem to think fondly of it, even going so far as to say in a feature with The Morning Call back in 2007,
“Even though there are some great songs on Vol. Two, I feel like the whole record sounds like I’m tired and drained … I needed to recharge my batteries before making another record … I wish I had done that.”
-Art Alexakis, The Morning Call (2007)
“I had people in my band telling me they wanted to do a really rock record … so I wrote really heavy songs and some of those songs on that record, I think, are some of the best songs I’ve written … but you’ll never hear them because the whole record on the whole, my heart just wasn’t really into it. … it doesn’t sound like Everclear to me.”
Well, Art, if it’s any consolation it does sound like Everclear, but it sounds like a hollow shell of the band’s former glory days.
It’s not necessarily a sad ending for Everclear and Art Alexakis though. As I mentioned near the start of this, the band transitioned into more of a touring and legacy act who rely on a lot of those 90s nostalgia touring circuits, and speaking of; they’re even on a tour celebrating their 30th anniversary right now as I type this out. Alexakis seems to be doing alright for himself in spite of everything he’s been through, and for that I applaud him!
On a final note: I know that Art Alexakis, for all intents and purposes, IS Everclear, but it’s hard to not see Craig and Greg’s absence as having taken a huge dent in the band’s legacy and sound, especially seeing as how they’re all credited as co-writers on all those songs. Who knows, maybe one day they’ll bury the hatchet and they’ll give us a new album or a reunion tour, and some day I hope they do, but until then the memories and legacy of Everclear stay firmly held in the late 90s and early 00s for all to see and hear. We’ll always have “Santa Monica” though, and that song fucking rips.
Let’s watch the world die together.
This is Harvey VD saying thank you for reading, and remember to kick out the ROUGE! motherfuckers! Peace.
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