Ace Enders & A Million Different People
- When I Hit The Ground (Vagrant)
By
Tris McCall
Q: Hey, man, what are you listening
to over there?
A: Latest album by Ace Enders. It’s called
When I Hit The Ground.
Q: Ace Enders? Isn’t that the
guy you keep calling the best songwriter in
New Jersey?
A: That’s the one.
Q: How come nobody over the age of 22
knows who he is?
A: We all have our own prejudices. Older dudes
seem to think that if a singer appears at Bamboozle,
or plays on the Warped Tour, he can’t
possibly have anything worthwhile to say to
a mature, sophisticated, over-the-hill music
listener.
Q: Well, okay. Didn’t Enders put
out an album last fall?
A: Yes and no.
The Secret Wars, Ace’s
’08 release, was made available for free
over the Internet. It wasn’t well-publicized,
and not too many people bothered to download
it. There were only eight songs, and Ace didn’t
sweat to make sure everything on the set was
letter-perfect. Some persnickety fans don’t
consider it a real Ace Enders album.
Q: You’re a persnickety fan. What
do you think?
A: I think it was a real Ace Enders album, and,
in hindsight, one of the best things he’s
ever put out. Enders doesn’t hit you over
the head with his songwriting skill, but it’s
there: All of his best records are growers,
and songs that seem insubstantial or half-written
on first listen often reveal themselves to be
superb and sturdy compositions over time. For
example, the second song on Secret Wars –
that’s “Red Eye” – felt
unstructured until I paid close attention to
what Enders was trying to tell me. Once I gave
myself over to the narrative, I realized how
well the soft-focus arrangement matched the
story.
Q: And what is Enders trying to tell
you?
A: Often it’s something about money and
social class. Enders doesn’t want to be
defined by the size of his wallet. He’s
smart enough to realize how difficult it is
to defy typical American expectations of success,
and he’s perceptive enough to see the
interpersonal games we play – including
showbiz conventions we all know and love –
as crude class battles in disguise. This is
unusual for contemporary pop-punk singers; most
of them are down on the fame game because it’s
cool to be, but they don’t recognize the
Warped Tour rat race they run as a version of
the corporate world they’re trying to
escape. Or maybe they’ll recognize it,
but they won’t sing about it. Ace Enders
will.
Q: So he’s some kind of a pinko?
A: No, not really. His politics, such as they
are, are typical South Jersey liberal, but he’s
a family-values traditionalist at heart, and
he possesses a moralizing streak as wide as
the blueberry fields of Hammonton. Enders isn’t
an overtly Christian singer, and for all we
know, he could be a godless heretic. He tells
us that standing in a chapel isn’t something
he ordinarily does, even as he sings to us about
doing things that would endear him to any worthy
congregation. Still, his lyrics often feel like
parables – ones that betray Sunday-school
training and a pretty rigid set of ethical concerns.
Ace recently wrote a triple-album around the
theme that a real man doesn’t run from
his mistakes – and if that sounds uncompromising,
believe me, it is. So when he objects to blind
materialism, he does so because it’s dehumanizing,
not because it’s politically unfair. “We
need to know that we’re worth much more
than a credit score;” that’s the
key line on
When I Hit The Ground.
We aren’t numbers on a graph or contestants
in a race, or lines on a ledger: We’re
organic, imperfect creatures, hardy but prone
to irreversible damage. Ace wants us to behave
like we know it.
Q: Don’t you think that’s
pretty heady stuff for a kid?
A: He’s not a kid anymore – he’s
probably in his mid-twenties by now. And Enders
has always been serious. He seems driven to
communicate. This isn’t a case of a formerly
happy-go-lucky pop star who has gotten heavy
as he’s aged; even when he was a teenager
putting out spotty EPs with The Early November,
he was howling at us with everything he had.
He understands his platform as a gift and a
burden, and he feels the need to justify the
attention he’s received. That’s
why he made The Secret Wars available for free:
He’s desperate to give something back
to fans that he’s more than slightly guilty
to have in the first place. As he sings on “Body
Like Mind,” “never forget who paid
to get us here”.
Q: Wait, you said he wasn’t a
Christian? Using born-again tropes like that?
A: I said he frequently draws on Christian tropes
to make his points. It wouldn’t be unreasonable
to assume that Enders was singing about Jesus
there; on some not-so-insignificant level, he
is, no matter how much faith in the Almighty
he has or hasn’t. I think it’s more
useful, though, to understand Enders as a writer
interested in the concept of sacrifice. He’s
sending one out to bandmates, friends, family-members,
strangers; we’re all dependent on each
other, and nobody would be able to hear Ace’s
voice if there wasn’t a structure in place
to amplify it. As always, his language is straightforward,
unornamented. He doesn’t bother turning
phrases – he just sings the way he might
speak. He’s hard and direct; forthright,
as the sages used to say. It’s not always
pretty, but it’s enduring, and it’s
the principal reason that Enders’ songs
stand up to hundreds of listens.
Q: Okay. So what’s the relationship
between The Secret Wars and When
I Hit The Ground?
A: For one thing, the new set is almost twice
as long. When I Hit The Ground consists of twelve
brand new tracks, and two songs that hardcore
fans will know from the free download. The version
of “Reaction” here is indistinguishable
from the one that kicked off The Secret Wars;
it might be the same performance slightly remixed
or remastered, or maybe the band just plays
it the same way. This doesn’t bother me
at all: “Reaction” is inexhaustible
pop. That’s the nice thing about listening
to a traditionalist songwriter – if on
first listen a song sounds like something you’ve
heard a thousand times before, the next thousand
times you hear it, you’re not going to
like it any less.
Q: Provided you liked it the first time
you heard it.
A: Right. And I did. Anyway, the other
Secret
Wars song on the new set is “Bring
Back Love (Year 2020)”. The version on
When I Hit The Ground is punched up
– full-band, electric rhythm guitar, and
a more aggressive lead vox performance by Enders.
This may surprise some people who only know
the original recording, which was cut campfire-style
with acoustic piano and guitar. The new recording
doesn't better the original, but that’s
because there wasn’t any room for improvement.
“Bring Back Love” is such a great
song that you could arrange it for bagpipes
and theremin and it would still connect with
audiences.
Q: Okay, I’ll bite. What’s
so great about “Bring Back Love”?
A: Let’s start by discussing what it isn’t.
It’s not a hippie song about teaching
the world to sing in perfect harmony. It isn’t
even particularly corny; not by Ace’s
standards, anyway. “Bring Back Love”
is at once stranger and more visionary than
its chorus initially indicates – and when
you go back and listen to the chorus after grappling
with the verses, you might agree with me that
it’s closer to the Book of Ezekiel than
Zager & Evans.
The narration consists of two related dreams:
Not hopeful dreams for the future of humanity,
but the sort of early-morning reveries that,
with their characteristic mix of symbolic, personal,
and prosaic detail, indicate to the sleeper
that it’s time to wake up and confront
the day. In the first one, Ace’s literary
proxy has wandered into church, heart heavy
with guilt. He’s got “nothing to
give;” not only is he broke, but he’s
spiritually destitute too. Then a stranger (tellingly,
not a priest) fills his pocket and orders him
to be productive.
Enders feels the need to break the narration
and tell us that we’re supposed to learn
from the man who has given the money –
and the accompanying responsibility –
to the main character. One chorus and a fitful
bout with the snooze-button later, we’re
out on the street, and there in the gutter,
homeless and hungry, waits a suburban iteration
of the Madonna and child. Unprompted, the protagonist
throws the doors of his home open to the woman
and her young son, and refuses payment. There’s
room at the inn, and the “inn” is
Ace Enders’ house. The singer then leaves
us not with a moral, but a posture: In the year
2020, he hopes he’s still standing in
the same place, with his head held high and
his arms up in the air.
This is not just a rock-star pose (and make
no mistake, Ace intends to keep rocking,) but
also the operating position of the preacher-man,
administering a blessing to the congregation.
Like all great Christian verses – including
those in the Bible – “Bring Back
Love” feels like a hallucination; hypnagogic,
neither awake nor asleep, but hovering in that
border-zone where reality feels permeable, mutable.
And what Ace wants to change is our relationship
to charity; not just giving stuff away in the
style of the Bill Gates Foundation, but caritas,
that higher-love that Paul writes about in the
epistles. (It isn’t going too far to take
“Bring Back Love” as a corrective
to the widespread misuse of Corinthians, Chapter
13, at everybody’s semi-secular wedding
ceremony.) Bring back caritas, treat money as
a means to an end rather than an end in itself,
and we could re-orient our lives around the
principle of interpersonal benevolence. Altruistic,
sure. Yet for Ace, this isn’t hypothetical:
he even gives you a drop-dead date in the mission
statement, just like your CFO might, in case
you assume he won’t be keeping track of
our progress. No song harmonized any better
with the national mood than “Bring Back
Love” did in ’08, and I’m
always going to associate it with the reasonable
hopes that accompanied what was supposed to
have been a transformative election –
an intervention in our national, and cultural,
character.
Q: Seems sort of indirect. Why not come
out and tell people to vote for Barack Obama?
A: That would contradict the spirit of the song,
and maybe even the spirit of the election. At
his best, Obama reminded us (and, likely, himself)
that the campaign that made a star out of the
candidate had more to do with an ambient desire
for change than it did with any of his personal
or professional qualities. No president is ever
going to save us, but we’ve always got
the capacity to help ourselves by altering our
behavior. If “Bring Back Love (Year 2020)”
had been an entreaty for a messianic figure
to step in and show us the way – a way
we already know good and damned well, even as
we feign ignorance – it wouldn’t
have been the best song written and recorded
during the last two years. Just in case you
need any more persuasion, Enders has come up
with exactly that entreaty, and he's put it
right before “Bring Back Love”.
“Leader” begs the heavens for a
hero with the capacity to stop the shooting;
of course it doesn’t work that way, and
“Bring Back Love” demonstrates that
Enders knows that better than anybody. Now,
we all got swept up in election fervor, and
even our best writers deserve a mulligan or
two. It doesn’t help that “Leader”
sounds more like Coldplay than anything that
Ace has ever recorded. Hell, I’m not even
sure that he wouldn’t hear that as a compliment;
he’s not a snob.
Q: You’ve got to be a snob to
hate Coldplay?
A: Believe me, it helps. Take it from an A-1
snob.
Q: But does it all have to be so overwrought
and portentous? Doesn’t he ever write
about stuff like girls and cars and guitars?
A: In fact he does, and
When I Hit The Ground
probably covers more of that territory
than any other set he’s waxed. The title
track – a power ballad with a sledgehammer
melody – examines a damaged relationship
from the perspective of the guy who screwed
it up. “Emergency” is the complimentary
piece, or maybe the counterweight: He’s
singing about the same exact thing, but instead
of cutting himself open and hurling pieces of
himself at the girl, he hangs back and counts
off the calendar days. As always, Ace’s
music suits the sentiment rather than the content
– “Emergency” is performed
as a lonely-sounding solo acoustic number, while
“When I Hit The Ground” harnesses
the full power of A Million Different People
for its window-rattling chorus.
Q: Say, who are these Million Different
People?
A: You know, that’s a good question. Ace
Enders is an excellent musician, and one entirely
capable of having played every note on this
set. (Every note, mind you – every drumbeat
was, unquestionably, provided by a session dude
with a radio-rock background.) Frequent collaborator
and right-hand man Chris Badami is back in the
producer’s chair, and he can probably
be held responsible for all of the electro hijinx
on the set. There isn’t much. Ace, however,
has gotten himself one of those fancy voice
processors-harmonizers-doublers from the Hammontown
Guitar Center, and here he gives his new toy
a digital workout.
If you’re already a fan, your reaction
to these super-smooth, carefully-manicured,
multi-tracked vocals will likely determine whether
When I Hit The Ground becomes a major
part of your life, or if you stick with the
rubbed-raw Early November albums. It’s
not like Enders is trying to put one over on
anybody or hide his newfound technophilia –
these professionally-massaged voices sit, squarely
and unashamedly, in the middle of the mixes.
On “The Only Thing I Have,” he even
pulls the band away for a few seconds, presenting
for the listener a steaming and finely-puréed
bowl of vocal soup. Personally, I find it a
terrific concoction, but I also think that
90125
is one of the tastiest recordings ever made,
so consider the source.
There are limits: Ace never makes himself sound
like a robot (more’s the pity), and when
the spirit moves him, he can still wind up and
deliver a genuine, rough-edged Saves The Day-style
shouter like “Where Do We Go From Here.”
But if you had a problem with the hyper-saturated
vocal sound of the most recent Startling Line
LP, you might find “SOS” a speedball
too slick to swallow. Now, none of these tracks
are going to get played on Z100, but you can’t
fault Enders for trying – as I said before,
he’s not a snob, and he really does want
to reach as many people as he can. What surprises
me about a record credited to A Million Different
People is that there aren’t any other
identifiable voices on in besides Ace’s.
Sure, some of the gang choruses could have been
sung by a cast of thousands huddled around a
microphone; they could also have been done by
Enders alone. This is unusual for an album with
this kind of inclusive scope; even on the very
self-absorbed (but oh so effective) We All Need
A Reason To Believe, the Valencia frontman clears
space for Rachel Minton of Zolof The Rock And
Roll Destroyer to kick a verse.
Q: Wait a second. Valencia? The Starting
Line? Saves The Day? Those are emo bands! Is
this an emo album? I can’t believe you
almost convinced me to listen to this! God,
I need a shower.
A: For starters, wiseguy, Valencia, The Starting
Line, and Saves The Day are terrific groups
– but as exciting as they are, they don’t
possess a songwriter as consistently interesting,
or just as consistent, as Ace Enders. All name-calling
aside, “emo” strikes me as a meaningless
term in 2009. Frankly I’m not sure it
was ever meaningful, but I’m not going
to deny that it has been applied to Enders’s
music many times. I doubt Enders would call
himself “emo”, but that’s
to be expected: it’s become one of the
few persistent genre-names that remains almost
entirely pejorative in its application.
Grown-ups don’t call music “emo”
unless they’ve decided it isn’t
suitable for adults. Older dudes do not like
to get shouted at – they’d rather
be lulled into a state of supine acquiescence
by Grizzly Bear, or intrigued to sleep by
Animal Collective. Basically, adults have
had a long day and they want to go to bed...
Grown-ups don’t call music “emo”
unless they’ve decided it isn’t
suitable for adults. Older dudes do not like
to get shouted at – they’d rather
be lulled into a state of supine acquiescence
by Grizzly Bear, or intrigued to sleep by Animal
Collective. Basically, adults have had a long
day and they want to go to bed, which is exactly
what Ace Enders (and Kenny Vasoli, and Shane
Henderson, and hundreds of other young singer-songwriters
who’ve been unfairly tarred with the “emo”
brush) refuse to let you do. They’ve got
something to tell you that feels – to
them, anyway – so crucial and so burning
that all alarms must be rung and all sleepy
space-cadets must snap to attention. There is
a useful name given to artists who testify on
the track with the sort of urgency that can’t
be faked – singers who, for whatever psychological
or spiritual reason, endeavor desperately to
impress their sincerity and their interiority
on their audiences, and who are driven to recount
their own stories of love, hate, sin, and salvation
to whoever will listen. We call these people
soul singers. That’s the sort of music
Ace Enders makes: Soul music.
Q: Come on. Are you really comparing
The Starting Line to Aretha Franklin, or Al
Green, or even Prince? It’s like you’re
begging not to be taken seriously. If there’s
one thing these mall-punk singers do not have,
it’s any soul.
A: Momus quotes Theodor Adorno in an electro-soul
song of his own: At the last, soul is just the
longing of those with no soul for redemption.
Q: Huh?
A: Look, you may not like the sound of Ace Enders's
voice, or you might not approve of the things
he does with it. What you can't do is disparage
his intent or question his dedication. Hell,
call him a bad soul singer if you want; I'll
disagree strenuously, but we can differ about
the singer's talent, or his imagination, or
the aesthetic efficacy of certain strategies
of self-expression. But if you believe in soul
at all, what you can't do is deny that Enders
has one, or dispute that his music comes straight
from it. If Al Green is entitled to a soul to
call his own, Ace Enders is, too: This is the
Protestant idea, right?, that each anima is
discrete, and dedicated to each distinct individual.
Or do you think that middle-class suburban kids
from New Jersey aren't entitled to souls of
their own?
Q: Hey, who is asking the questions
here?
A: I am. You didn't think I'd let two people
type on my computer at once, did you? I don't
just invite anybody into my home. No one in
here but me, me and the voice of Ace Enders
(on my CD player). I'll handle the questions
and the answers, thank you.
Q: What is this, Fevers &
Mirrors?
A: I'm glad you brought that up. I couldn't
help but notice Conor Oberst's name on the
River To River Festival schedule, right alongside
Indian classical musician Karsh Kale, Los
Salseros del Hudson, and a chick from the
New York Metropolitan Opera. This suggests
that a certain mainstream – hell, highbrow
– attention has accrued to Mr. Bright
Eyes. Now, I happen to think that Conor Oberst
is a good songwriter; I'm not one of those
people who has to vomit in a bag the minute
a Bright Eyes number comes on the stereo.
If nobody calls him "emo" anymore,
I'm just thrilled that somebody escaped the
ghetto; it gives me hope for humanity, and
maybe even the Internet.
But I say this with emphasis: There isn't
a single thing that Conor Oberst does that
Ace Enders doesn't do better.
But I say with emphasis: There isn't a single
thing that Oberst does that Ace Enders doesn't
do better. Even at his most unnecessarily vainglorious,
Ace is the superior singer and easier to put
up with on the mic; he's also the skilled multi-instrumentalist
that Oberst only wishes he could be. Oberst
can be poetic, but he's got none of the focus
or economy that characterizes lyrics penned
by the Bard Of Hammonton. As ambition goes,
it isn't even close: I remind you people again
of Ace's staggering triple-album.
Fans of Bright Eyes (and Desaparecidos) will
be quick to point out that Oberst's palette
is ten times wider; he's been a restless dabbler
in different styles, he's even gotten good at
some of them, and unlike the standard Drive-Thru
artist, he doesn't shoot for the lowest common
denominator and the wallets of the Warped Tour
crowd. It's true that Enders is a more tradition-bound
and rule-governed writer – but he's proven
surprisingly flexible, too. Unusual for a former
punk with clear Top 40 aspirations, he's not
confined to typical songwriting conventions.
Consider: the first song on
When I Hit The
Ground doesn't even have a chorus. Even
"Leader", the only real misstep and
the set's only unimaginative composition, builds
to a pretty nifty extra bridge that The Matrix
or Glen Ballard would almost certainly have
excised. Enders follows his nose. Many of his
best songs don't have refrains – they've
got releases. He lets the emotion simmer, blows
through a few choruses, gets your attention,
and then tacks on an appendix where he can holler
out the stuff he's really dying to say. "Over
This," for instance, saves its sterling
sound bytes for the last thirty seconds. Enders
writes hooks because that's his audience's expectation;
if you show up at Bamboozle without big singalong
choruses, the kids tar you and feather you and
leave you on the Turnpike. Don't be fooled –
the hooks are there to hypnotize you, and to
make sure you're tuned in when the singer drops
science.
Q: Sounds like a good way to avoid MTV
and highbrow respect.
A: Maybe. Pop has a perverse habit of punishing
authentic characters, and Ace is definitely
one of those. It doesn't help that he's from
the swamps of South Jersey and that he shows
no signs of relocating to Kingsborough –
there are certain parts of the rock game that
he's not willing to play, and a price for
that reluctance invariably gets exacted. When
I Hit The Ground isn't exactly a kid's record,
but it's being marketed to the same audience
that used to follow The Early November. A
valid sales tactic, and a safe and justifiable
one, too, but eventually an aging punk rocker
must run into diminishing returns. Listeners
for whom The Room's Too Cold and
For All Of This meant everything
in the universe – young "emo"
kids with the words to "Ever So Sweet"
written in magic marker on notebooks –
get older and need to concentrate on something
other than songs. And while it's chronologically
true that Enders is aging along with his listeners,
Ace's aesthetic will never be commensurate
with adult contemporary expectations. He's
far too fiery for that; too moralizing, too.
I move that it's only grown-ups who believe
that art shouldn't be loaded with righteous
invective. That's because they're already
compromised, and they can't bear to be reminded
of the ideologues they once were when... well,
when they had the lyrics to "Ever So
Sweet" scribbled on their notebooks.
Q: Doesn't that moralizing tone get
wearying after awhile?
A: Spoken like a true adult. I move that
it's only grown-ups who believe that art shouldn't
be loaded with righteous invective. That's
because they're already compromised, and they
can't bear to be reminded of the ideologues
they once were when... well, when they had
the lyrics to "Ever So Sweet" scribbled
on their notebooks. Only somebody who was
already predisposed to call Ace sanctimonious
would fail to recognize that all of his critical
songs are wholly self-implicating. Enders
doesn't claim to have transcended our economic
system or our collective frailties, because
that would be absurd, and he's got his Jerseyan's
distaste for esoteric absurdism intact. He
doesn't put himself above anyone – he's
down in the trenches with the rest of us,
clear-eyed and even-handed, pointing out things
we really ought to be noticing. Christians
– real Christians, I mean – are
comfortable with the notion that we can be
imperfect beings and still have something
to preach to our peers; we're all damaged,
so we may as well speak out with all the lung-power
we can muster. I believe religious folks (and
there are always more of them than you'd think)
ought to appreciate this album, and not just
for “Bring Back Love” and the
anti-materialist polemics. "Sweeter Light"
is one of those songs that could be dedicated
to a friend, or a parent, or a girl, or a
God. Ace knows it doesn't really matter; more
importantly, he knows why. It's not just love,
it's caritas – and it's always within
reach, waiting to be seized (with urgency!),
and brought back.
