Turning to Partly Sunny Later in the Day

Album: Bob Mould, Black Sheets of Rain, 1990

Best Track: "It's Too Late"

Lasting Memory: Exactly one day after receiving Bob Mould's Black Sheets of Rain as a 21st birthday present in 1990, I was involved in what should have been a very serious automobile accident on Interstate 64, just south of Williamsburg, Va.

The whole thing was fittingly poetic, but not in the way that the album's title would suggest.

The day was perfectly sunny, and the pavement was bone dry. The album is a mostly light-hearted recap of the leadup to and aftermath of the breakup of a long-term relation. There is only a smattering of doom and gloom on the album, and there was certainly no impending disaster on the horizon for me at that moment.

The stretch of highway I was on is flat, straight, and separated by a completely treeless and guardrail-less expanse of median. It is also maddeningly prone to total traffic stoppages for no reason at all, during which every driver has to decelerate from 75 mph to 0 mph in less than a minute.

While grooving to Black Sheets of Rain, I ran up on one of these parking-lot occurrences and stomped on my brakes. Not owning my own car at the time, I was driving a rented Dodge 4-door something. All fiberglass and relatively low to the ground.

Not knowing the car well enough to know if I would be able to stop in time before running into the car in front of me, I jerked the Dodge onto the shoulder of the center median and coasted to a stop. No harm so far, and it turned out I could have stopped within the lane after all.

So glancing into my rearview mirror to see if I have space to pull back into traffic, I saw an SUV of indeterminate but very large make squarely in my hindsights and growing bigger and bigger at an alarming rate.

Having nothing else to do, I took my foot off the brake and pulled hard to the left, into the median. This evasive action did little to minimize the impact, as the SUV must have been going about 30 mph when it smacked into my rented Dodge and pushed me into the center of the median.

And whaddaya know? I wasn't injured. The Dodge wasn't dented, and the SUV suffered just a cracked cover of one its headlights.

The only losses were a couple of oranges, which got knocked lose from an overstuffed grocery bagful of Thanksgiving leftovers and which rolled out of my driver's side door when I got out to yell at the SUV driver.

I still miss those oranges.

And I still don't know what that friggin' SUV driver was doing driving on the lefthand shoulder when he had more than enough room in the lane since I was no longer occupying it.

What I do know is that Black Sheets of Rain is everything I earlier complained that another album Bob Mould recorded with his band Hüsker Dü, The Living End, isn't. The production on Black Sheets is clear, and the songs are catchy while also being insightful. I might even go so far as to describe "Disappointed" as playful, life-affirming, and '60s pop-like:

Well I'm sorry you're disappointed
But times they change and so did I
Standing still and getting nowhere quicker
Well it seems I didn't have to try
But now I've found a reason to move on
And you won't miss me much now that I'm gone
You don't seem disappointed

The three years I went to college
Didn't make much of a difference to me
Made me feel so safe I didn't have to think
About the things I really wanna be

So don't get caught up in that trap
They'll make you feel like you've been trapped
Into owing them your gratitude
And all the other platitudes
That make you feel important when you go
But now I've found a reason to move on
And you won't miss me much now that I'm gone
You don't seem disappointed

'Cause when you're gone, somebody else will come along and take your place
It doesn't make me feel any less a member of the human race
This ain't no race

Well I'm sorry you're disappointed
But I don't feel that way today
I am free from all the crazy games you played
I am free from all the things you say
And I don't mean to make a mockery of the things
you thought I'd say when I left, but I'm not disappointed

And if I felt the urge to say you're wrong
Well, I just hold the words inside and laugh
And you'd be disappointed
So disappointed
So disappointed

Nothing on Black Sheets of Rain is exactly a day at Chuck E. Cheese's, but it's all nice enough. Even the ominous-sounding title track ends with this affirmation that the sun shines even when we can't see it:

A little rain is all we need
(Someone stopped the sun from shining)
Where will you be in my darkest hour of need?
(I never see the sun stop shining)
Where will you be in my darkest hour of need?
(Someone stopped the sun)
Here it comes again

The heart of the album are the songs that proceed most directly to its dual theme of the recognition of and resignation to loss, "It's Too Late" and "The Last Night." But, just as the album's title baits and switches, "Last Night" describes the beginning of the end, while "Too Late" is the tale of moving on.

All of Black Sheets is pleasingly ironic, which, to finally get to my point, is what made it a fittingly poetic soundtrack for a car crash that destroyed nothing but oranges.

Up Next: Peter Murphy, Deep, 1989