Being terrible and listening to Reclinerland (2001)

An album full of songs about Manic Pixie Dream Girls (this is a good thing for the desperate).

I was young and I didn’t understand what love was.

I was in a relationship I wished was over – that I wished hadn’t begun – but felt overwhelmed by an inability to do much about it. This was a relationship with a good woman who I felt badly about; I felt bad about a lot of things.

I was barely into my 20s, and the whole endeavor of loving had a sick sheen of guilt all over it, a lingering and tragic haze of religious shaming from a god I did not believe in. I had been conditioned, throughout my youth, to understand that my desires were wrong and bad, and so I had coupled off with a girl who I wanted less than she deserved.

Scars were forming; I was doing damage to both of us by not admitting to myself that I didn’t want to be where I was, with who I was with, doing the sorts of things I was doing. I was an emotional criminal, and I would not pay for the crimes I was committing for years to come.

I was infidelitous, even if only internally, emotionally. Every other attractive girl I came into contact with – in classrooms, at parties, over MSN Messenger – became a potential escape hatch, someone to attach a lot of water-damaged longing to in hopes that their buoyant charms might lift me from my trappings. As if transferring my baggage from person to person could help me understand what was wrong with me.

I had a lot of crushes; not a one of them knew how desperate I was in my situation.

It was thus feeling – smothered by my own religious trauma and locked into a toxic relationship with someone who wouldn’t have been toxic without me around – that I first discovered Reclinerland’s second self-titled album.

Released in 2001 by Hush Records, Reclinerland is a collection of songs custom-built for kids with crushes; more, I think, for kids who wish they had a crush and, what’s more, wished that crush could save them. It’s forty-nine minutes of somewhat saccharine pining, written by a stellar songwriter with flawless pop sensibilities. While it never solved any of my problems it certainly didn’t hurt my post-adolescent yearning.

Nearly every song on the album presents a vague, Manic Pixie Dream Girl — and this is a good thing for the right sort of person; after all, those manic pixies of the early 2000s were designed to fix all those stupid, bad, broken boys who created them. They were liferafts for the self-absorbed and emotionally stunted.

For boys like me.

From the very first lines of opener “Miss Haze”, songwriter Michael Johnson illustrates his abstract yearning: “Maybe I’m jealous of windows and bridges/because they get to be walked all over and looked through/by you”.

This is an album about the put-upon and hindered kids, the type that always got in their own way or found themselves somehow constricted by situations that seemed out of their control (but were, without a doubt, completely of their own making). Johnson — or Johnson’s avatars — are lost in a way that only the privileged and depressed boys of the world can be. In “Eight (Edit)” he yelps about a sort of ennui brought on by the banality of working life, as if getting up and going to work has somehow destroyed his ability to feel correctly. “I think I’ve broken the record for just standing in one place/I think I lost all the feeling in the right side of my brain/it’s hard to explain this lonely feeling,” he relates, and then a wicket guitar comes in and blows the rest of the song to its conclusion.

“19th Century Boy” doubles down on exploring that ennui by introducing more layers to our irresolute avatar: he’s a mumbling boy who doesn’t “have words to blow you away with,” who needs his crush to guess “why I’m not sleeping”. He’s unique, this sufferer, and this plea to some woman who can save him might feel trite under a lesser songwriter, in a less catchy tune.

This unique and sensitive boy only gets more so: “As Paranoid as I Am” illustrates a boy who identifies with the arts over the practical. Further, our fourth crush-object of the album develops her own identifying passions. “She’s the front row at a silent movie/I’m the boy with nosebleed seats to the symphony.”

It might seem like I’m tearing into the narrative frivolity of Johnson’s songs here, but know that I am not: these songs barbed me with an earnest longing, helped me imagine someone I could love who did not make me feel bad for being there; I imagined that there were people in the world who could understand that the place where my love and sexuality were coming from was unhealthy and misunderstood. Someone who got art, got movies that I did not, could help me see that I wasn’t a terrible person because of my hormones. I wanted to put my heart — and my healing — in the hands of someone somehow cultured and enlightened; my rural and isolationist upbringing had never presented such a person.

For all the exasperation for these sorts of stories — sad boy gets saved, young man crushed by the realities of life, etc, etc — there is a sort of truth behind them. Just because they seem vapid and cliche doesn’t mean those cliches aren’t coming from genuine experience. A person who doesn’t go through some small crushing epiphany moving between childhood and adulthood surely doesn’t exist.

What these songs didn’t teach me right away — something that I came to understand only after coming back to the album two decades later — is that all of this is deeply (perhaps dangerously) self-aware, self-mocking. Johnson’s got a smirk on his face, throughout the album, cracking that the world doesn’t need “another pair of star-crossed pen pals” in “Vegas Remains”; these feelings, the songs want the listener to understand, are perhaps too self-absorbed.

It’s not the Manic Pixies who save the day; it’s the depressed party finding their own way out of a bad situation.

For all the smarmy self-awareness, the album holds a lot of sincere emotion and genuine calls for understanding. Please, these songs plead, understand me. At the end of “Yours”, Johnson croons: “You are my plan; what’s yours?” What a bold, honest sentiment.

My life shifted not long after falling in love with this album — there were big, screaming fights, sexual miscalibration, and a long trip to a hospital only minutely connected to these troubles. The relationship ended, and though she wouldn’t agree to it at the time, it was an incredibly positive thing for both of us. I found myself freer than I had for years; I was still desperate for some sort of new, pop-song-worthy relationship, but now these were crushes I could engage with. And I did so poorly, with desperation; it would be years before I fully understood myself enough to attempt to understand someone else.

It took me years not to think of women as potential liferafts.

Michael Johnson moved on to a different sort of songwriting after this album. Reclinerland’s The Ideal Home Music Library, Vol 1 came out in 2003, and took the shape of fictionally lost show-tunes, rediscovered and reinterpreted by Johnson and company. They played like peepholes into lost musicals, and they were not what I hoped for at all. They were songs for people in different personal crises; they didn’t clamor for recognition. They didn’t demand to be seen; Johnson had grown past all that, and now he was making something closer to timelessness than all this pointless pining.