“A Shot in the Arm”

Our favorite songs change meaning over time

Do you know the Wilco song “A Shot in the Arm” from their 1999 album, Summerteeth? It contains some of the most evocative lyrics that frontman Jeff Tweedy ever sang:

The ashtray says you were up all night When you went to bed with your darkest mind Your pillow wept and covered your eyes And you finally slept while the sun caught fire

There were plenty of nights in my life when I filled ashtrays until dawn. These days, I’m much more of a morning person. Those precious few hours before the rest of the world wakes up are my favorite time to write.

I also quit smoking years ago, along with several other unhealthy habits. Caffeine and sugar are my drugs of choice these days. My mind still gets plenty dark just paying attention to the 24-hour news cycle.

I loved this song back then because I related to the self-destructive sentiment. Now I mostly love it for the period of my life it represents. Maybe it’s a dose of rosy memories and nostalgia, but it’s also something I lived through. I think a lot about living through things these days.

You’ve changed Oh, you’ve changed

Yesterday I got the first dose of the COVID vaccine. I tried listening to Summerteeth on the 25-minute drive to Dodger Stadium, but couldn’t really get past the third song. So “A Shot in the Arm” was on repeat as I navigated the massive maze of orange cones that filled the parking lot.

But I wasn’t only listening because of the apropos title. What I was mostly thinking about as I approached the possibility of a post-COVID reality, was how our favorite songs change meaning over the course of our lives.

Maybe all I need is a shot in the arm Something in my veins, bloodier than blood

Tweedy was never a syringe-slinger (and neither was I, for that matter), so this isn’t necessarily a song extolling the romantic junkie mythos (like, say, “Heroin” by the Velvet Underground, or “Chinese Rocks” by Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers). Instead, the lyrics seem to grapple with that nihilistic urge to sabotage your dreams rather than face almost certain failure.

I always took the “shot in the arm” line to be a desperate prayer for peace. An easy escape from overwhelming self-doubt. That was something I could really relate to back then, and why—as a longtime Wilco fan—I continue to applaud the hard-won success they achieved and maintain to this day.

In many ways, Wilco’s career arc has been endearingly human. The first two albums (A.M. and Being There—and their partnership with Billy Bragg on the two Mermaid Avenue collections) is the band’s adolescence. They were full of great ideas, but still groping for ways to properly express them.

Wilco finally hit their stride with the stunning album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001). The momentum generated by that one carried them through two more mature releases, A Ghost Is Born (2004) and Sky Blue Sky (2007). Neither of those follow-ups captured the zeitgeist quite like YHF, but still present a band with the self-confidence to openly embrace change.

What you once were isn’t what you want to be anymore

Summerteeth was the album right before YHF. It captures the band at a crossroads and sometimes gets unfairly overlooked because of it. Upon reinvestigation, however, you can already hear the fiery, but phenomenally fruitful studio partnership between Tweedy and Jay Bennett starting to gel. (All of which is brought to life in the excellent 2002 Sam Jones documentary, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco.)

Summerteeth portrays a band daring to take some chances on a new direction, one that shook them from their “Alt Country” comfort zone and launched them into the indie unknown. It’s a pronounced stylistic shift that is most apparent on tracks like “I’m Always in Love,” “Via Chicago” and, of course, “A Shot in the Arm.”

If YHF was a grand slam, Summerteeth is the album that loaded the bases. (Forgive me: I was sitting in a baseball stadium parking lot.)

So that’s what was going through my mind as a friendly woman stuck a hopeful needle into my arm. I listened to the song three more times during the fifteen minute holding period that followed. And once more as I exited the parking lot and made my way to a nearby record store—only to discover that it had shut down its retail operation because of the pandemic.

I was hoping to grab a copy of Summerteeth on vinyl as a sort of, I don’t know, memento. Instead I was once again reminded of just how much this past year has changed us as individuals and as a society. It is anybody’s guess how those changes will play out down the road, so all we can do is move forward.

We fell in love in the key of C We walked along down by the sea You followed me down the neck to D And we fell again into the sea

I know it’s just a song, but this one’s part of the soundtrack to my life. It meant one thing to me in 1999, and will probably mean something different now that I renewed my vows with it in a strange ceremony at Dodger Stadium.

And, who knows? It might mean something totally different the next time I listen. That’s the thing about great songs, they change meaning over time—coming to meet us where we are in our lives at that moment.

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