Caws for Distress: My Problem With Nada Surf

I'm hoping that in a few weeks I'll be over it.

On June 5 Nada Surf are playing Mercy Lounge, and normally I would be tingling with anticipation. I really love their particular breed of melancholy power pop and, after over a decade playing together, they are one of the tightest live acts out there. But recently I've been having something of a Nada Surf problem, and its all Julie Klausner's fault.

At the end of April, the actor/comedian wrote an entry in The New York Times' "Modern Love" series about a brief fling she had with a "cute guy from a rock band." They email, they text, they fool around on the murphy bed in his Brooklyn apartment. Eventually they talk about his son, and how the mother is denying him visitation. They sleep together and then he kind of blows her off.

I was underwhelmed by the essay when I read it. The guy seemed unavailable but Klausner pursued him anyway. She decided to get involved and then seemed a bit pouty when he didn't like her back. Overall, the whole relationship seemed like a non-incident—and failed to impart the grand overarching message of life and love that "ML" normally guns for.

The next day, Gawker outed the anonymous indie rocker as Matthew Caws from Nada Surf. (They also took the easy one-hit-wonder cheap shot and posted a YouTube clip of the "Popular" video.)

Now I find that Nada Surf songs make me kind of uncomfortable. I don't really know what it is. I mean, I've listed to tons of songs Caws has written about the ins and outs of his romantic relationships—hell, I've even interviewed the guy—but something about the nature of the details in Klausner's essay makes me feel like I know too much. I appreciate the artistic distance between musician and fan—it's part of why I'm strictly anti-gherm—and somehow that's been violated. It's ironic that we want our songwriters (of a certain genre) open, and lap it up when they fetishize the mundane, but that the magic can be so easily dissapated by a shot of real reality. We want our idols to be relatable, but it can be devastating to find out that they're really just like us.

Writer Jonathan Franzen has an incredibly insightful essay in his collection How to Be Alone about privacy in the modern age. He talks about how the Lewinsky scandal violated the grand pageant of political life. He didn't want to know about cigars and blue dresses. Well, I guess I don't want to know about murphy beds and knees slid between thighs—at least not without the protection of metaphor or a great hook.

The sad thing is that the new Nada Surf album Lucky is really excellent. The lead single "See These Bones" is one of the best songs Caws has written. I'm pretty confident that I'll get over this little mental glitch—maybe someday it will even help deepen my appreciation for Caws' clever little encapsulations of heartache. And I'll still go to the show, even if I do spend a portion of the evening wondering about his reaction to Klausner's calling his music "typical emo stuff: droney, thick, exhausting, but obviously heartfelt."

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