Here, There and Everywhere with The Junior League
Thoughts on The Junior League almost always have to start with The Beatles. The Junior League’s songwriter, singer, and sole full-time member Joe Adragna would more accurately point to The Monkees. But no Beatles, no Monkees.
Beatles Week was a staple on American Idol, and during one Beatles Week, judge Randy Jackson scolded a male contestant for a performance that was neither faithful nor an interpretation. I don’t remember which song, but the version was neither fish nor fowl because, the contestant admitted, he didn’t know the original. He had no fundamental musical idea to embrace or react to, and his take reflected that.
On American Idol, that was one way producers put their invisible thumbs on the scales, by the way. Contestants whom producers believed in performed songs that suited them well. Ones they were less enamored with had to figure out what to do with one-dimensional songs or ones they didn’t know.
Jackson went off because he couldn’t believe that a singer—even a young, African-American one in the 2010s—would admit that he didn’t know the song and barely knew The Beatles. Jackson treated the contestant as if he couldn’t be serious if he didn’t know The Beatles. The moment revealed a lot about Jackson’s age and his distance from the lives of young men like the singer. Born in 1956, Jackson was 11 when Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released and grew up with The Beatles on the radio. In the 2010s, the contestants would have had to actively look for The Beatles because they weren’t showing up unbidden on radios, televisions, or computers. Jackson’s belief in the value and craft demonstrated in Beatles songs made sense, but most of the contestants would have spent a lot more time with the hip-hop and R&B of the moment because it carried social capital and spoke to their lives in a way that psychedelic British pop and rock didn’t.
It’s a testament to the music made by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Kinks that it has endured as well as it has. Their brand of pop/rock went from cutting edge to radio’s default setting for the early ’70s (the Grass Roots, Raspberries) to a formal exercise (power pop by Shoes, The Nerves, The Diodes, and the Sire Records-era incarnation of the Flamin’ Groovies), to a late ’80s, early ‘90s rejuvenation (The Go-Betweens, Teenage Fanclub) capped by the Britpop explosion with Blur and Oasis in particular.
Since then, that sound has become subcultural. Hip-hop’s star ascended at the same time that a belief in the Holy Rock’n’Roll Trinity of electric guitar, bass, and drums felt more like faith in the Easter Bunny. That doesn’t mean there has been any decline in the quality of Beatlesque pop made since then, only its place in the world. Once, it was the straw that stirred the cultural drink. Now it’s like a secret handshake that tells other guys in black Converse that you’re part of the club.
Joe Adragna is part of the club and has other guys who know the handshake helping him out. Jay Ferguson from the excellent Canadian pop band Sloan contributes piano on one song, and Adragna gets contributions from other members around North America including Scott McCaughey of The Minus 5 and Young Fresh Fellows. “He knows where I’m at,” Adragna said in an interview, so he sends McCaughey rough mixes of Junior League tracks to mix. “He’s an incredible arranger.”
Frequently, the pleasure in power pop records, including those by The Junior League, is formal. How well does the artist employ the trademark sounds? Can they make songs that sound fresh, or at least timeless? Bonus points if they can make it sound personal and reflective of something real. The new Junior League album scores on that last point.
The Moon Neither Noticed Nor Ignored shows the impact of the times we live in, but only in the details. Start with the piece of art chosen for the cover: One is for Sorrow (by James Christopher Andrews). Like the songs themselves, there’s nothing obviously sad in the painting, but you get a hint where the album’s going in that title, as well as the sketch of Atlas holding the weight of the world.
Each song works on its own as jangle pop, complete with harmonies that make it sound at least upbeat if not cheerful, but the sense of things going wrong shades every song, as in the opening track, where Adragna sings “No one saw the light in Sunset Park” in one verse and “No one seemed to care” in the next. The next song, “A Matter Of Time,” starts, “Waiting for the shoe to drop / always good until it’s not;” and even a title like “Just As Long As I Have You” promises a song about how important someone is to the singer, focusing more on the mess than the love that preserves him: “Every day watching normal slip away / and there’s always some disaster.”
Adragna doesn’t sing any of this as if he’s beaten, nor is it like Big Star’s Third with an emotional breakdown baked into the arrangements. He plays Beatlesque pop like it’s a talisman against evil, and he has been making songs in this mode with a wiry intensity since 2006’s aptly named Catchy. If the songs were heard in a playlist, they’d sound like more of the same, but the darkness that feels like a trope in one song coalesces into a very real force. Familiar phrases like “Never Quite The Same” and “The Sun Will Rise” become titles loaded with meaning.
Is Adragna feeling his age? The degradation of life in Trump’s America? The “extended states of melancholia” he names in “Forget Forget Me Nots”? All possible, but the emotional struggle he tries to play off gives The Moon Neither Noticed Nor Ignored a vitality that others in the club rarely find.
For more info, check out thejuniorleague.bandcamp.com.
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