Best Ex Feels Stronger with Weakerthans – The Village Voice

Mariel Loveland: To me, the best albums are albums that age with you. I think back to my childhood, begging my mom to drive me to the sort of suburban strip mall that was one of the few places teenagers could loiter away from our parents. Back then, the world seemed so big and our options were limited: we could throw rocks by the creek if the weather was nice, spend hours watching each other chain-smoke in the local diner, hang out in a basement that belonged to a friend whose overworked single mother was rarely home, or plant ourselves in Borders Books. We often chose the latter, spending our Saturday afternoons parsing through Nylon and NME, pulling out albums to sample on the in-store headphones.

It was there that I discovered Reconstruction Site by the Weakerthans. I was, at the time, on the precipice of adulthood. I had not yet experienced loss beyond burying a carnival goldfish in the backyard, but I was also an anxious child acutely aware of that eventuality. In many ways, the album (almost entirely themed around grief and illness) felt like a guidebook to the pain of adulthood, but it also served as an homage to the forgotten moments of youth — the speaking to siblings through heating vents or crawling around adult feet at family gatherings. 

In one of my earliest memories, I recall sitting at the dinner table with my family, hiding Flintstones vitamins under my napkin, and trying my best to ignore the sinking feeling in my gut. I didn’t know where it came from. Maybe it was the realization that we are separate from our loved ones and truly navigate life alone. Maybe it was a fear of the inevitability of time. I called it, in my limited vocabulary, growing up. I never heard anyone describe it until I listened to the title track:

His father laughed and talked on the long ride home
And his mother laughed and talked on the long ride home
And he thought about how everyone dies someday
And when tomorrow gets here where will yesterday be
And fell asleep in his brand-new winter coat

Throughout the years, I grew up alongside the album. In college, I’d stare at the sun peeking through the gray sky and recall “A New Name for Everything.” It felt like insurance that time doesn’t just take things away, it can also bring you clarity, understanding, and direction. 

When I entered the world as a working adult in the midst of a historic recession, I became a cat owner chained to my bed with sadness and unemployment. I wondered, does my cat feel like the cat did in “Plea from a Cat Named Virtute?” The thought was enough to pull me to the screen door and sit with her watching the birds chirp (especially because, by then, I knew how the story ended). Years later, I knelt on a dirty hospital floor and prayed over beeping machines like in “(Hospital Vespers).” The eventuality became the now.

Today, more than 20 years after the album’s release, I still find new meaning in the songs — especially in the sonnets hidden in the album’s interludes. I recently came across Pitchfork’s review, which said the album would be best relegated to “a smarmy Ivy League college radio show.” Perhaps there is a glimmer of truth in that because, as a girl who was once president of the high school poetry club (with the popularity to match that role), the album has always made me feel like less of an outsider. It always reflected the world back to me in the way I saw it. It’s one of the few albums I can say truly possesses a lifetime.  ❖

Best Ex’s With a Smile album is out now.

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