What Means the World to You: 2015 in Musical Memories
January: The Mendoza Line — “Settle Down Zelda”
On January 9th my wife gave birth to our second child, a tiny, healthy young woman named Juniper Frances. We took her home from the hospital a few days later, and she was generally in good spirits, though we would soon come to find out that there was one very clear and non-negotiable condition to her happiness: That she was attached, literally, to my wife.
On the rare occasion they would go their separate ways—so that my wife could shower or, like, eat food—I would take over. Loathe as I am to feed into all those stupid stereotypes about bumbling idiot fathers who don’t know how to deal with babies, it is a simple fact that we are at a distinct disadvantage early on: We are not fresh off nine months of having allowed the kid to live inside of us; we typically don’t have the most soothing speaking voices; and, most importantly, we are not capable of producing milk, which, for breastfeeding moms anyway, is the ultimate parenting trick. So we have to find alternate methods. We rock and bounce and spin in circles; we make funny faces and say lots of dumb shit in lots of dumb voices we probably wouldn’t want anyone else to hear. It’s not pretty, but it gets the job done. We hope it does, anyway.
One day during that first week home, with a crying baby in my arms, I was doing some combination of these things while also listening to music. She didn’t much care for “Richard” by Billy Bragg, or “Halloween Parade” by Lou Reed, or “The Curse of Great Beauty” by Clem Snide, or even fucking “America” by Simon & Garfunkel for fuck’s sake. But when she heard “Settle Down, Zelda,” a beautiful and little-known song by the massively underrated and sadly forgotten NYC band The Mendoza Line, it was like magic. Whatever pain, discomfort, or confusion she was experiencing went away immediately, and I remember her staring up at me with a look that seemed to say thank you.
Over the next few weeks, the song became a saving grace for me, and for Junie, I guess. I’ve always loved the song, but I’d never heard it quite so many times in such a short span. We listened to it endlessly, and when it wasn’t playing on the stereo, I was singing it to her. It worked for us. It was the means by which I could provide for her.
At some point along the way, I started to hear the song in a way I never had before. It’s about a woman who tried and failed to save her father from drinking himself to death, and it’s told from the perspective of a man trying to save her from herself, from the fallout of her experiences, as they begin to wreak havoc in her own life. But what struck me so much on repeated listening is that this isn’t a story about a dude stepping in and making everything better; it’s about a dude who realizes he’s not going to fix everything simply by virtue of the fact that he thinks everything needs to be fixed. “Let your bitter heart shine, I don’t want to refine you, throw a blanket over a birdcage” is suddenly the most beautiful line I’ve ever heard. And then the ending: “Oh I wish I could tell you just to settle up, Zelda, but you ain’t gonna settle down.”
I have two daughters, now, and I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how I want them to be treated, by myself, of course, but also by every other man they meet. I hope they never feel broken, but even more so, I hope no one ever tries to fix them. It’s tempting to think of Zelda with an unhappy ending, abandoned by a man who finally threw his arms up in the air, and I think that’s how I saw it for years. But it’s more gratifying, and more realistic, to think that when left to her own devices, she overcame.—Mike Conklin
[sc:mendz ]