He Just Wanted to Wash the Dishes, Man.

A Review of Micah Schnabel's THE CLOWN WATCHES THE CLOCK.

Micah Schnabel's music has been a constant in my life for the past 20+ years. Micah had just turned 21 when I first met him and Shane Sweeney and Dustin Harigle (the original lineup of his band Two Cow Garage) in June 2003. We hung out at the show, I booked them a Milwaukee show, saw them in a bunch of different towns around the country, mostly in IL and WI. I meet my wife because of them. They play an after-party at our wedding.

Along the way, I'm in grad school trying to figure out what I'm doing with my life. Trying to convince myself not to quit. Micah's starting to write songs about the same stuff, except it's about the music industry and whether he should just walk away from it all. I felt that one deeply. And, I've just always had a sense that Micah and I have similar anxieties? Or maybe a similar sense of how we see the world. On the other hand, I cannot neglect the question that Rob Gordon might ask: do I listen to Micah Schnabel's music because I'm miserable, or am I miserable because I listen to Micah Schnabel's music?

All of this is just context to my actual review of THE CLOWN WATCHES THE CLOCK.

Micah Schnabel and Taylor Swift have next to nothing in common - other than perhaps an uncanny ability to take a feeling and turn it into a song in which others can experience that same feeling. And like Taylor Swift seems to be on her recent release THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT, Micah's worn-out. And like Swift, it also feels like he’s writing before he runs out of time.

The songs are desperate. Bleak. Micah has something to say and he needs to get it out while he still can. Both albums are very much about their experiences of the past few years. And as a friend put it, anyone with a conscience and empathy are exhausted. Donald Trump came down the elevator. The Russians hack one of our political parties to sow discord. Trump wins. We have a pandemic. January 6. Ukraine. Gaza. I don't know if anyone noticed, but I have a suspicion World War III has already started.

"Land of Impending Doom", indeed.

But what I’m really stuck on, listening to this album, are the differences between Micah and Taylor. She is at the apex of her superstardom. If there is any human being that has the financial resources and the connections and the general goodwill of the public, it’s probably her. I genuinely hope she is living her best life. (And please note I am an avowed Swiftie.)

In Micah’s world, however, things are not going great. He’s clearly grappling with feelings of hopelessness. In the first verse of the first song, he paints a dark picture: “A talk show host that drives a Cadillac promises them their lives will be better after they’re dead. He’s mostly right. But for all of the wrong reasons.” And things get darker from there. 

Micah’s album is fundamentally a documentation of how it feels to be poor and on the outskirts of society over the past half decade. And Micah is, as previously noted, exhausted. Curiously, Taylor writes like she's exhausted too. She writes like there's a lot of things she needs to get off her chest and she desperately needs to get it out. Taylor writes about her love affairs. Micah writes about how impossible it is to afford basic dental care. We need all types of art, of course. The beauty of music is that we can work out our thoughts and feelings through art and by doing so maybe make connection with the rest of the world. Still, I can't say that I blame Micah one bit when he says he doesn’t want to hear that shit about money not solving problems. 

"4 Vignettes from an American Strip Mall" sets the tone - four scenes from America in 2024. A church running out of a Mexican restaurant that used to be a Pizza Hut. A sports bar running a memorial for a recently-killed bartender. A dollar store manager coming home from a long day to find an eviction notice. A waitress at a 24-hour diner.

Money is their problem. Their problems are that they just want to exist in society, and society says we're going to make this as hard on you as possible. Memorial fundraisers when they die. Private equity firms buying up all the housing. People are just trying to make it through. On "Real Estate", Micah works through the job options he might have. These come with a multitude of indignities:

Lock the doors and mop the floors 
It’s a simple operation 
But a drug test and a background check
Is a criminal investigation 
“How am I supposed to write love songs under these conditions?" 
The waiter just shrugged his shoulders; 
He wasn’t much for conversation

Unsurprisingly, he's far from optimistic:

Optimism is a luxury item not everyone can afford 
Sweeping up the trash down here on society’s bottom floor 
Dreaming of a brighter tomorrow 
Doesn’t do nothing for me today 
I keep signing on these dotted lines 
Giving it all away

I'm reminded of something Steve Earle wrote almost 30 years ago: "you go to school and you learn to read and write, so you can walk into the county bank and sign away your life." As sense of hopelessness pervades most of Micah’s album.

Everything Micah could do sounds hollow to him. He could write new words to a Stone Temple Pilots song and join a praise band ("Christian Band"). He could go into real estate; he notes that he's always been a people person. But he's also honest with himself about where he's at ("Get Rich Quick"): 

I’m not attractive by societal standards
Or talented in an exploitable way
But my morals are loose and expendable
And I’m looking to get American paid

Where does this leave him? In the laundromat hoping that dryer #33 doesn't set his clothes on fire - though maybe it's worth it to if your laundry gets done faster. Better to not spend so much time in what is ultimately a humiliating experience - folding laundry in a public place that actually leaves him feeling like a criminal just for existing. I picture him (or anyone) sitting there dreaming of how nice that sunny Florida beach might be ("Land of Impending Doom"). But you can't escape the shit of the world, and certainly not in that state. 

Nothing of the world is as it's supposed to be. It’s 2024. We are 9 years removed from the flying cars Back to the Future promised us. It feels like we are closer to 1939 than we are to 2039. And when Micah sings that what “started out as a party, kinda feels more like a wake” (“Happy Birthday, Baby”) all I think about are the promises of the future we were told, and how dismally far away from those promises it all feels. As he notes in White Roses:

The great experiment in sharp decline
Our party hats on as we all get in line
To conga the caskets of what could have been
Down to the river of what is

The album climaxes with CoinStar, where Micah explicitly pleads with the universe: I don't want to be poor anymore. He's tired of pretending. What does it say about the world when the best economic choice he could make would be dealing cocaine? He's just been putting up a facade to make everyone think he's alright, but really he's very, very willing to sell out. Selling out sounds pretty nice. Maybe he could buy fancy toothpaste. Go to the doctor.

Can you end an album like this with anything resembling hope? Micah sure is trying:

Good luck out there.
And to all my soft hearted anxious folks
Keep cranking that steering wheel
Just left of the telephone pole of despair
I need you.
This world needs you.
I know that probably doesn’t help right now, but it’s the truth.

Musically, this album is the perfect marriage of the punk rock sounds of a full-band Two Cow Garage album with the more introspective, spoken-word songs that have become Micah's specialty over the past decade. The music itself mimics the anxiety of existence Micah describes. The album begins with driving, pounding guitars on "4 Vignettes" and the album is off and running. 

The album is a short 33 minutes, but I'm exhausted by the time I reach the end of this album. And I'm exhausted because Micah is exhausted, and my god does he do a great job of making me feel his emotions. Which is exactly why, as I mentioned earlier, this album makes me think of Taylor Swift. I'm fascinated by the juxtaposition of Taylor Swift, writing an album about the inherent exhaustion of the past few years - Taylor Swift, best known for writing about her relationships; lamenting and celebrating her romantic partners - with Micah Schnabel, writing about the inherent exhaustion of mere existence.

In combination, you really see the cultural divide in America in 2024. This review is about the album, not politics, and as such I'll probably write a separate essay. But it's an important subtext to experiencing this album, at its release in Spring 2024. This is what it's like to be poor in America in 2024. Non-stop indignities, both major and minor, leaving you exhausted.

I am not poor. My family does well for ourselves. We are not exactly elites, but we have a voice, and we try to use it to make our community better. Micah does not, to my knowledge, have access to the elites of Columbus, OH. But he sure as hell has a voice on this album. And we’d be better off if we listened to him.