Two pretty different songs, musically and lyrically, though each one features a well drawn portrait of a man eating dinner alone. In Built to Spill’s “Big Dipper,” it’s a standalone vignette, the second verse all about Jack, his thoughts, and his dinner plans. Doug Martsch basically writes a Gary Lutz story in one line with this, at the end of the verse: “He thought an Albertson’s stir fry dinner would make his apartment a home.” It’s such a good observation, a perfect description of a kind of desperate, grasping need to make your life feel a little more whole, a little less brittle and grim.
Wilco’s “Summerteeth” is a more circumspect song, elliptical and figurative. But part of the main action of the song is another snapshot of a man eating dinner. “And every evening when he gets home/to make his supper and eat it alone/his black shirt cries/while his shoes get cold.” Tweedy is straight-up reporting on the circumstances of the main character, then follows it up with an intense pathetic fallacy, the shirt’s fucking weeping, the dude’s shoes are sitting there ice cold on the floor. Misery! Compounded by a later detail: “He feels lucky to have you here/in his kitchen, in your chair.” Feeling lucky to have another person in his space. Whew. When I listen to this song, the way I imagine this dude’s place is like the little garret the character Apu inhabits above the print shop in Satyajit Ray’s “Aparajito,” a small, dark, one-light-bulb kind of place.