Ego Crush Is So Severe

Overindexing on the minus

Once upon a time I opened for Sheryl Crow. You know her songs: all I wanna do is have some fun and I’m gonna soak up the sun and if it makes you happy then why the hell are you so sad and when you go all I know is you’re my favorite mistake. Classics. I’m prone to hyperbole, but I’d call her one of the best songwriters of her era¹ with zero reservations.

I’ve probably mentioned it. Too often, even. But I did. She’s arguably the biggest artist I’ve ever opened for².

Tell the teenager standing with his girlfriend Katie and brother Andy³ on the third row at Wolf Mountain in 1995, seeing Sheryl Crow on her Tuesday Night Music Club tour that he’s gonna be opening for Ms. Crow in about 15 years. He’ll trip.

Tell the twentysomething in floor seats at the E-Center with his friends in 1999, seeing Sheryl on her The Globe Sessions⁴ tour that in about 10 years he’ll be opening the show. (The opener that night in 1999? Semisonic.) Later that year, the twentysomething will see Sheryl play the Bridge School Benefit concert, sing a duet with Emmylou Harris, play accordion with Neil Young.

Tell the twentysomething who sees Sheryl on back to back nights during the 2002 Winter Olympics—first at an unannounced surprise, seat-of-the-pants show at a small club called Harry O’s in Park City, and the next night at the gigantic outdoor medals ceremony in downtown Salt Lake—that he’s gonna open for Sheryl Crow before the decade is up. That twentysomething’s finally working on an album that he’s proud of, so he might (secretly) dare to think it’s possible.

That 2002 dude would think, “Well, clearly, I will have made it as a musician. I’ll be the real deal.”

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“Crow looked all night like she was having fun. She had a task of boosting the crowd's energy. The one-man opening act, Paul Jacobsen seemed to be trying to sedate the audience with melancholy songs on his acoustic guitar and banjo.”

Oof.

That’s what the reviewer wrote in the Salt Lake Tribune about my set.

Ouch.

It will not surprise you that this stung (stings!), that this stuck with me⁵. That I’ve thought quite a bit—too much, even—about it. That I may have hate-looked-up the writer’s other concert reviews (he didn’t have any; this was his first and—last time I checked—his last) to see what other artists he’d written about (none). That I angrily sat down at one point to write a song about the writer, whose actual job as a journalist was a crime scene reporter⁶. That I didn’t finish said song (what else is new?).

But, just objectively, let’s break down the one sentence he gave me.

My songs are melancholy. I take no issue with anyone saying so. It would be weird if they didn’t mention it. The issue, then, is that his assessment is stated with negative connotations. A ding against me. A crime, even. That peppiness is somehow the default positive, the platonic ideal⁷. That I had failed some unspoken assignment. (Yes, I’m really reading into my one sentence. Stick with me here.)

You wouldn’t say, upon hearing Leonard Cohen play one of his songs, “Great, Leonard, but do you have anything….peppier?”⁸ Some people just….write sad songs. You wouldn’t ask Mondrian to paint a realistic apple. You wouldn’t ask Cormac McCarthy to write a rom-com (though I would 1000% read it). Are we gonna ask the Village People why they never sing sad songs? As Kevin Bacon once said, for everything there is a season. People need sad songs too. History has proven that.

The main thing that really bummed me out in that one measly sentence, though, was “trying to sedate⁹ the audience”, which again has some claws to it. It’s not just a review; it’s a judgment with teeth. The guy was not into me or my songs or my vibe and wanted to make sure that was clear.

Which, to credit his writing, it was.

Why am I dredging this all up, all these years later?

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John Gottman, who wrote The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work with Nan Silver, is perhaps most famous for a study in which he found he could predict divorce with 94% accuracy (!) after spending just one hour observing a couple in conversation. He could do it after only 15 minutes too, but his accuracy went down to a not-too-shabby 80-something per cent.

Gottman did a few studies over decades of research and one of them was cataloging a simple two-column record of + and - in a conversation. It could be content, tone, body language, etc. But he would track, over the course of the conversation, each spouse’s + and -. A compliment? PLUS. A backhanded compliment? MINUS. Contempt or sarcasm? MINUS. (Yikes, I know. As a fatally sarcastic person, over nearly 18 years of marriage, I have learned the hard way that sarcasm works more as a rare spice than as a flavor or theme). A harsh glance? MINUS. A gentle touch? PLUS. Gottman’s simple finding was this: if the two columns’ ratio was less than five positive for every ONE negative, the relationship was doomed. (Yikes. Again.) And that was just for relationship SURVIVAL, not thriving. The desired ratio for happiness was more in the neighborhood of 20:1! TWENTY TO ONE.

Makes you want to wake up every morning and immediately rattle off 20 things you love about your significant other, just to give yourself a little wiggle room.

5 to 1. 20 to 1. That speaks to the power and durability of negativity. It’s loud. It’s durable. It persists against the odds.

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Recently, an artist I like a lot, Jenny Lewis (of solo career, Rilo Kiley, and Troop Beverly Hills¹⁰ fame) took a couple days worth of social media heat for defending her friend Bethany Cosentino (of Best Coast fame)’s first solo album¹¹, which got a not-great rating¹² from Pitchfork, one of the biggest music review sites around. Cosentino gets a little salty about it and Lewis joins in. (Pardon her language.)

It takes almost no research at all to find that Jenny Lewis is one of Bethany Cosentino’s longtime heroes. My Google search immediately found one article from 13 years ago where Bethany talks about how much Jenny Lewis’ music influenced her, in the first Google Result. So, to get a word of validation from Lewis is a big deal. Good for Lewis, reassuring someone—who just did a really hard, vulnerable thing (step out on your own)—that some snarky review site doesn’t get to define you. It also took very little research to find a rather pointed history between Jenny Lewis (which she alluded to) and Pitchfork¹³.

The heat came from the critic side of Twitter¹⁴, which was understandably miffed at artists trying to devalue their line of work (which, y’know, has some chicken/egg and pot/kettle implications for sure) just because they don’t like the review. I, for one, used to have a shoebox full of Bad Reviews of Good Albums that I tore from the pages of Rolling Stone and Spin and Harp and whatever other music rags I used to read. It was a reminder that a critic is just one voice, albeit an ultra-amplified and often authoritative voice. Some albums I love deeply were trashed soundly by some critics. Rolling Stone famously panned Led Zeppelin’s albums, which is comical now.

Critics, getting defensive not wholly unreasonably, would still have to cop to the fact that Pitchfork has a storied, bloody history of being Mean For Sport. The early days of Pitchfork were cutting and condescending, and they often overslaughtered¹⁵ albums just for the perverse joy of it.

I noted this in the footnotes, but in case you didn’t read it, via metacritic.com (a site that compiles reviews from all over the web, not unlike Rotten Tomatoes), the average score for Cosentino’s album is 74/100. That makes Pitchfork’s score of 59 demonstrably lower than most. No wonder it stings.

John Gottman’s relationship research might apply here too, helping us see why the bad reviews—even if they’re the exception, as Pitchfork’s seem to be for both Cosentino and Lewis—leave a mark. If the ratio of positive-to-negative for a just-surviving relationship is 5-to-1, what is the ratio for positive-to-negative in the heart/mind/soul of an artist who has created something and gets slagged (or ignored) by a notable publication or a critic who’s not in the mood?

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As I walked offstage with my guitar in hand, the sound guy on the side of the stage clapped, told me I was his favorite opener of the summer. That would feel good anytime, but it felt especially good because I was still walking on the clouds, having performed how I’d hoped. I felt like I’d earned his compliment. I sang with heart. I played solidly. My jokes landed. The audience had responded. I was on.

Another guy in the crew complimented my Kathleen Edwards cover (“Six O’Clock News”, a melancholy tune about a woman watching her lover in a standoff with the cops, LOL). A few other crew members made sure to stop me and tell me they loved my set. These guys don’t have to (and usually don’t) say anything so it’s all the more meaningful when they do.

The promoter stopped me as I packed up my stuff, telling me I was perfect for the show, exactly what he’d hoped, thanks for doing it. He handed me a check that a) I wasn’t expecting and b) was the most I’d made for any gig in years.

My phone lit up all night with messages from friends and family in the audience. “You killed it.” “DUDE!” “What a set!” My people showed up for me.

I went out into the crowd to sit with Holly during Sheryl’s set and had no fewer than 20 people stop me to tell me how much they enjoyed my songs and was I from here?

When I went to the merch tent after the show to gather my CDs, the merch team informed me how many CDs I’d sold. It was, to this day, the most I’ve ever sold at a single show, not counting CD Release shows for obvious reasons. Besides all of the emotional, qualitative reasons the night felt good, it was also a success using quantitative sales metrics. By every measure, a great night.

I had opened a sold-out show for one of my heroes. And, somehow, I’d pulled it off.

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You know the next part. I already showed it to you above.

It’s the 1 in Gottman’s 20-to-1.

The next morning I woke up to the review in the Salt Lake Tribune. Even the night before’s high and formidable 20-to-1 positive-to-negative ratio couldn’t save me.

Back to earth again. Ego crush, as Olivia Rodrigo sings, is so severe.

I suck. They hated me. I thought I was good but clearly I wasn’t. I’m a fraud. Melancholy blah. I was aggressively boring. SEDATION.

All because of one guy’s take. And not just one guy, but a guy who got free tickets from his work in exchange for writing the first (and only) concert review of his journalism career.

It’s like changing the Coca-Cola logo because Focus Group Greg from Illinois thinks the cursive is weird. But we do it.

Why?

Why do we overindex so much (20-to-1, 5-to-1) on the negative? Why do we let the severely outnumbered “one” live rent-free in our heads?

Even with a guy—Greg from Illinois or crime scene reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune—whose opinion shouldn’t (doesn’t!) matter to me. Even if crime scene reporter had impeccable taste in music, if his music collection somehow perfectly mirrored mine, why do I suddenly care what a guy I’ve never met thinks about me, or thought about my 6 songs on one summer night? Why is that suddenly outweighing all the real-life stuff I’d felt just hours before?

And beyond “suddenly caring”, why do I still care? In 2023?

1. One of my recent favorite ways to discuss/compare artists is via Their Best 5 Songs.

For instance, I am prone to claiming that The Kinks Best 5 Songs are as good as any other band of their era. I could hear an argument that their catalog doesn’t have the strength/depth of the Stones or Who or whoever (and could also hear the argument that it DOES). But, to me, their Best 5 Songs are as good as anyone’s best 5 songs.

For the record my Best 5 Kinks songs are as follows:
-Waterloo Sunset (maybe a Best 5 song ever)
-Strangers
-You Really Got Me (the template for rock music, in my opinion)
-This Time Tomorrow
- Lola

Oh, and my Best 5 Sheryl Crow songs are:
- I Shall Believe
- If It Makes You Happy
- My Favorite Mistake
- Strong Enough
- Riverwide
- C’mon C’mon
- The Difficult Kind
- Members Only
- Anything But Down
- Steve McQueen
- Hard To Make A Stand
- Can’t Cry Anymore
- Everyday Is A Winding Road
- Halfway There
- Home
- Run Baby Run
- It Don’t Hurt
- Leaving Las Vegas

Crap. Is that more than 5?

2. No, I did not meet her. I probably could have if I had pressed the issue. But I believe that one of the reasons I get asked back by promoters for shows like this is because I don’t press the issue. I’m professional. I’m on time. I play a solid set. I don’t embarrass the promoters. Would I have liked to meet Sheryl and tell her how much I love “I Shall Believe” and “Riverwide”? Yes.

The people I’ve opened for have been who I talked to and were the nicest:
- Glen Phillips (of Toad The Wet Sprocket)
- Chris Carrabba (of Dashboard Confessional)
- Ellis Paul
- The Jayhawks
- Ron Sexsmith
- Megafaun
- Erin McKeown
- Ryan Bingham
- Laura Gibson
- Willy Vlautin (of Richmond Fontaine)

I won’t list the un-nicest.

3. To this day, Andy swears—on stacks of Bibles and back issues of National Geographic—that when Sheryl sang “Strong Enough” that she was looking directly at him, singing to him. Andy’s a good-looking guy, so it’s not WAY out of the realm of possibility. But he was also 15 years old at the time. So, yeah.

4. My favorite Sheryl Crow album.

5. In my craw, whatever that is.

6. It wasn’t a good song by any measure. The chorus:

Poor, sad, lonely crime scene reporter
Sitting around, waiting for something to go wrong

7. This reminds me of Susan Cain’s book “Quiet” in which she questions the societal norm that extroversion is the default positive.

8. You would actually first say, “…Leonard…we all thought you were…dead.”

9. The Ramones wanted to be sedated, so how bad can sedation be? People pay good money for that sorta thing.

10.

11. Apropos of nothing, Cosentino’s album has some real Sheryl Crow vibes.

12. Pitchfork gave the record a 59/100, which isn’t great. Via metacritic.com, the average/aggregate score on Bethany Cosentino's album: 74/100. That makes’s Pitchfork’s score of 59 demonstrably lower than the average. The writer goes out of her way to knock the songwriting (“hackneyed lyrics” “her couplets beg you not to think too much about them”), which is the right of the critic, I suppose. But there’s still a real person on the other end of the barb. Probably bleeding.

For reference, Cosentino’s highest-scored Best Coast album was 2010’s Crazy For You that got an 8.4 and the coveted Best New Music tag from Pitchfork. Best Coast’s lowest scored record was 2012’s The Only Place, which happens to be my favorite Best Coast record. It got a 6.2 (still higher than her solo album). The reviewer of that record dogged on Cosentino’s “obvious choices” and “lack of care.”

At least Cosentino’s critics have more than one review to their name.

13. A breakdown of Jenny Lewis’ album scores from Pitchfork. TL;DR: her average Pitchfork score is a ho-hum 6.3.

Rilo Kiley / Take Offs and Landings: 4/10 (This was her first album reviewed by Pitchfork so it doesn’t take a post-doctorate psychologist to see how the primacy of this review could have really stuck to Lewis. A four is bad. The reviewer says, "kind of boring, and a little too self-consciously precious for its own good.")

Rio Kiley / The Execution of All Things: 7.5/10 ("a band known for so-so records")

Rilo Kiley / More Adventurous: 6.7/10

solo / Rabbit Fur Coat: 6.1/10 (The reviewer says that Lewis would be better off just doing covers because her songwriting isn't up to snuff? Of all the reviews, this one seems the most wildly low and off-base. This album is broadly revered. For just a few examples, 100 from Uncut, 91 from Village Voice, 83 from AV Club, 78 from Austin Chronicle. You don’t play a 10-year anniversary show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville with special guests M Ward and Jimmy Buffett if the album is mid.)

Rilo Kiley / Under The Blacklight 5.1/10

solo / Acid Tongue: 6/10 (the lede is "immediately pleasurable" but then the reviewer goes and gives it a score below the “underwhelming” previous solo album? Make it make sense.)

solo / Voyager: 7.2/10

solo / On The Line: 8/10 (Best review of her career, in which the reviewer calls it "some of her strongest songwriting")

solo / Joy'all 6.7/10 (the review says the music is blase)

All in all, with an average score of 6.3, Lewis would be well within her rights to be upset that Pitchfork is basically calling her “mid.” To understand her angst towards Pitchfork, though, compare their scores to the average score from all other publications:

Acid Tongue: 60 from Pitchfork vs 75
Voyager: 72 vs 77
On The Line: 80 vs 85
Joy’all: 67 vs 79

That’s an average of almost 10 points lower per album.I mean, it seems personal to me?

14. I refuse to call it X because that’s silly and because X is a seminal Los Angeles punk band.

15. Not a word.