17 Days To Dudes: "Wherever You Are"

I love Paul Westerberg. He is the most empathetic American songwriter to have emerged in the past thirty years. This is remarkable, given his personal background and the fact that he came out of working class Minneapolis bashing and clanging along in a group of musical misfits aptly named The Replacements. Anyone else in this situation might have found their avocation in merely spitting venom and pissing blood, but Westerberg was at his best when writing to or about someone else, bringing all of his considerable lyrical talents to bear on a solitary subject (“Skyway,” “Black-Eyed Susan.”). He was almost as good, but not quite, when singing in first person (“I Will Dare,” “Unsatisfied”).

I always wondered how he wrote these empathetic songs so well. In interviews, he always came off as something between a drunkard and a curmudgeon, not the sort of guy who would ever sit you down and ask you how you were feeling. But if you were to ever find yourself in the shit and, for some magical reason, Westerberg felt compelled to write about your situation, you might find yourself completely fortified and redeemed in less than half a verse based on the sheer passion and commitment he committed to your struggle.

As it turns out, Westerberg’s trick was fairly simple, as he revealed in an interview after Don’t Tell A Soul. He mostly just wrote about himself, then changed the pronouns: ‘I’ became ‘you,’ or even ‘us’ if he felt the need for some imaginary cronies to have his back. It turns out that the most empathetic American songwriter of the last thirty years was actually projecting his own self-loathing, self-pity, self-sabotage and, occasionally, self-love onto his subjects.

This might sound like an underhanded move. But not so much when you think about how much of this kind of projection actually goes on in real relationships. We oftentimes don’t make the effort to really see someone else for who they are because we are too busy trying to see pieces of ourselves in them, things that are familiar, things we can identify with. We like mirrors, especially the pretty ones that reflect an improved image back at us.

Does all this take anything away from the power of Westerberg’s music? No. The act of effectively disguising an ode to oneself as a tribute to someone else still requires a level of mastery that is unfamiliar to most. Westerberg is the King. I would like to think that, if he were ever to hear “Wherever You Are,” he might crack a crooked grin of sly recognition before ejecting the cassette and throwing it out the window of a beat-up cargo van, that battle-weary beast he shall forever be driving through the thin and tired American midnight.