Twenty Life-Affirming Lyrics from Les Savy Fav

I last saw Les Savy Fav, one of my favorite bands, in June 2024. This was the first time in a decade I'd seen them without having to travel to another city, which would normally just be a nice treat but, now that I have a small child, is a necessity. My wife and I were already pushing it when we brought our pit bull Pumpkin Pie to Brooklyn and left her in a pod hotel for a few hours. You can't do that with a small child. He'll run the room service tab up.

In Philly, while Les Savy Fav was on, Johanna had to use the restroom. The venue, Union Transfer, has gender-neutral bathrooms and as Johanna was finishing up and washing her hands in an otherwise empty room, LSF's singer, Tim Harrington, opened the door. He was still singing, but he asked "Is this okay?" Johanna said yes. Tim lapped water from the sink into his mouth, kept singing and dancing, and then re-emerged into the greater venue. Nobody saw that little show but Johanna. Nobody knows about it but him, her, me, the friend we were with and the people we've told.

That's often how it is with LSF. I took a Megabus from DC to New York to see them in 2009 or 2010 and partway through their set, Tim made a huddle of people in the aisle. I was standing on the outside and he waved his hand at me, gesturing to join in. From within the huddle, we all sang together. There's the show everybody gets and the show-within-the-show you luck into when this beautiful maniac in full costume triggers two consecutive balloon drops and then starts rubbing static electricity into your hair. It's one of the most inclusive, joyful environments you could hope for. When I'm at one of their shows, and often when I'm just listening to their albums, I often think "This is the good stuff." I don't wait for the feeling to hit me later.

The lyrics have always either followed that spirit or set precedent for it, which is not to say Les Savy Fav is a one-note party band (and this is not to say I don't love a one-note party band). There are Les Savy Fav songs like "Comes And Goes" that will crush me. But when I'm looking for a whip-smart pick-me-up, I often turn to Les Savy Fav. Thinking about why, I realize no other band mixes dread with celebration. In the song "Clear Spirits," Tim Harrington sings "Clear spirits, I need no greater proof, the proof of me is you" through the chorus, and his verses are all about a destroyed New York City and eroded gravestones. That isn't a "but" separating those ideas and this isn't a dichotomy. We celebrate because we know things are rough and we need to take advantage of this time we have. We celebrate because there are more of us than them, even if they are putting the world in a bad place. We don't celebrate the bad but it isn't all bad so let's celebrate what we can.

Here are twenty life-affirming Les Savy Fav lyrics (plus that "Clear Spirits" one from a paragraph ago) in release date order. Use them as you will.

No, fuck it, here's twenty-two lines.

1. "I've got a theory things are going to work out / I've got a feeling that I don't know what I'm talking about" from Cassolette
2. "I have got my coat on and I'm headed for the gates of the great estate. They can't loose the dogs on us because the dogs like us more than the dogs like them." from "Who Rocks The Party?"
3. "Call the cops to haul us in, they're already here, up on the chandelier, this is the party of the year." from "Who Rocks the Party?"
4. "Dreaming dimwits take a stand, on this night we must demand, let the microscope be damned by the hammers in our hands" from "The End"
   1. Tim Harrington's stage antics, while great, have probably helped shift focus away from his status as one of the great lyricists.
5. "They watered down the poison in this town. They raised us wrong. They raised us strong. They raised us up with arms ten feet long." from "In These Woods"
6. "What we don't know can't hurt us yet" from "Tragic Monsters"
7. "Insurance can't cover what the world's exposed, open nerves, touching toes to stretch, the AC made us wretch" from "Reprobate's Resume"
8. "Can we declare, though sacred, this room to be a sovereign state where citizens share skins and sins and copulate? 'Cause if we can I think we should and shouldn't waste a breath." from "Crawling Can Be Beautiful"
9. "Who here finds this world distracting? Who here finds this world a bore? Who here thinks we're all play-acting and that the show's piss poor? I, for one, am dazzled, I don't care if dazzled blind. Rapt, enraptured, captured by every little thing I find" from "Crawling Can Be Beautiful"
   1. I don't know how a person writes something like this.
10. "Hold your horses, cool your jets, you can't make me be finished yet" from "Disco Drive"
11. "If you disappear without a trace, they won't give chase. If you disappear without a trace, no hearts will break. If you disappear without a trace, as some must do, if you disappear without a trace, take me with you." from "The Slip"
    1. I've always loved the way this lyric was arranged in the liner notes. In the booklet, it reads:
       "If you disappear without a trace:
       A) They won't give chase
       B) No hearts will break
       C) As some must do
       D) Take me with you."
       
       That's what you get with a band of designers.
12. "Wake me up when we get to heaven, let me sleep if we go to hell" from "The Sweat Descends"
13. "We filled up our pockets 'til they would explode and called the whole world here so they could behold / the light of our love beats the dark and the cold" from "We'll Make A Lover Out Of You"
14. "We got old but we got good and we did all we said we would" from "Meet Me In The Dollar Bin"
    1. This is a line I aspire to live. I think about it all the time. It's a gravestone line if I've ever heard one. It reminds me of Charles Bukowski's "Victory," which I will now post, sans line breaks:
       
       "What bargains we have made we have kept and as the dogs of the hours close in, nothing can be taken from us but our lives."
       
       That's what it's all about, or what I'm trying to make myself about.
15. "This is where it stops and this is where it ends, let's tear this whole place down and build it up again, this band's a beating heart and it's nowhere near its end" from "Pots and Pans"
    1. Notably, this was the first song on Let's Stay Friends, LSF's first album after a semi-hiatus where they didn't do much touring and mostly focused on their Inches series. I remember in an interview at the time (2007), after the band hadn't released a studio record since Go Forth (2001), Tim Harrington described their circumstances as less the band breaking up with each other and more the band breaking up with the world. They still hung out and played music, they just had to focus on day jobs and stuff. "Pots and Pans" hits especially hard if you know it came at the end of that (public) dry spell, when it seemed like Les Savy Fav were becoming the kind of act that quietly fades away.
16. "The world may seem cruel, the worldly may hate us, in time we will show the world why the world made us" from "What Would Wolves Do?"
    1. Another life motto.
17. "You're god damned right I resent the rent / not just the leases or the money spent, it's the way that it keeps me from the present tense / won't somebody meet me in the present tense?" from "Scotchgard the Credit Card"
18. "We've been bought and we've been sold / They try but they can't keep hold / We burn, but we don't turn to coal / We're hills all filled with gas and gold" from "The Lowest Bitter"
19. "Show us your teeth and show us your tits and show us the scars from the shit that you did, and we swell up like ticks on the hide of the night, it makes better men sick but to me it's all right." from "Appetites"
20. "I don't need you to soothe me, to fix me, to prove me, I just want you to want me now" from "Let's Get Out Of Here"
21. "We'll all fade away, but we're here today / we're all half alone / we've got mouths, let's make them moan" from "Let's Get Out Of Here
22. "I hope someday we can say 'We were there when the world got great and we helped to make it that way'" from "World Got Great"
    1. The song "Rome" is a thrilling part of LSF's live show, in part because it's a great song and in part because the band will stretch the song out and Tim will often lead a call-and-response chant. In the All Tomorrow's Parties (2009) documentary, LSF has a quick scene where they perform the end of a stretched-out "Rome" and I thought Tim was singing "I was there when the world got grey, and I helped to make it that way." I don't know if the line changed between that recording and the 2024 release of their album Oui, LSF. It's possible I misheard "great" as "grey" and it was always more celebration than self-castigation. Either way, this is better. And thank god the song is called "World Got Great" or I'd still think he was singing "world got grey."