Notes in the Paranoid Style: A Conversation with Elizabeth Nelson

Elizabeth Nelson writes about music the way a good lawyer argues a case—with total command of the record, genuine passion, and compelling arguments by the crate full. She’s also funny as hell, with excellent taste and a way with words that I’ve long admired.

Elizabeth is also the frontwoman and chief songwriter of The Paranoid Style, a band also featuring her husband Timothy Bracy, late of the Mendoza Line. Their fifth album, Known Associates, came out earlier this year to the kind of reviews that make me glad to have been onboard from the start. Fresh Air’s Ken Tucker described Nelson as the most persuasive argument he knows for the ongoing vitality of rock ’n’ roll. Another critic described her as writing like a court reporter for the American psyche.

In addition to her musical adventures, Elizabeth is a regular contributor to The Ringer, Oxford American, Pitchfork, GQ, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. She has also penned liner notes for the Replacements’ Let It Be reissue and the 27-disc Bob Dylan/The Band 1974 Live Recordings box set—which brings us to today’s conversation.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about liner notes—particularly those that serve as a definitive capstone for an artist, album, or era. Certainly the appeal of liner notes has gotten “more selective,” in the Spinal Tap sense. And some are drivel. But the best are transmissions of deeper kinds of wisdom; cultural, critical, testimonial. Elizabeth’s notes feel like an act of care in an era that has made everything equally accessible and in some ways, equally expendable.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I go way back with Elizabeth and Timothy from my Washington D.C. years. The details of certain adventures remain classified. What I can tell you is ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓. Regardless, I was thrilled to have another opportunity to talk to Elizabeth, scribe to scribe.

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Casey Rae: You’ve written about the Replacements and Dylan, both of whom inspire a level of devotional fandom that borders on the religious. People don’t just love these artists, they organize their identities around them, sometimes their entire worldview. Having written about the Grateful Dead, I’m familiar with this phenomenon. Does that kind of devotion inform how you consider an artist and their work?

Elizabeth Nelson: For sure, it’s something that I take into account. I am also not afraid to challenge some of the more entrenched orthodoxies even if it ruffles feathers. With the Replacements liner notes in particular, I was less interested in the image of them as degenerate screw-ups and more interested in the internal dynamics that would cause four working class kids to harness the moxie and work ethic necessary to pull themselves, at least partially, out of the cycle of abuse and poverty they had lived in. That was more interesting to me than their antics, though their antics are often funny. I may have frustrated certain fans committed to the proposition of their incompetence. But the Replacements weren’t incompetent, and they weren’t unintentional. These were ambitious, hard working, even visionary kids who transcended what the world expected of them, what it seemed to hold in store. It is, in many ways, a story about upward mobility through sheer sweat equity. 

CR: Given the word count already expended on some of these artists, it’s remarkable how fresh you make these records feel. I do wonder, though, how much weight historic criticism might hold for you.

EN: There is of course a profound raft of scholarship around Dylan—Greil Marcus alone has written eight thousand books about him. That said, I don’t consider myself beholden to any of that. I obviously respect Marcus, but he and I have deep disagreements about the canon generally, and Dylan’s catalog in particular. I don’t feel the need to follow him or any other critics into places I consider intellectual or cultural cul-de-sacs.

I wrote a Sunday Review of Dylan’s album Desire a few years back, which held some fairly contrary positions about the record, and the folks at Sony Legacy were sufficiently impressed that they contacted me shortly afterwards to offer me the chance to write the Live ’74 notes, so obviously they thought I was on to something. Jeff Rosen, Dylan’s longtime manager, edited me personally and loved the result. And the set sold out quickly, so fair to say however unconventional my approach, the whole experience went well.

Obviously, if you want a twenty-seven CD set of the ’74 tour, you're probably a pretty big Dylan fan. On the other hand, I don’t try to write for those people, per se. I tried to write about what it was like for Dylan and the Band to come back out on the road after a long break, with the memory of having been relentlessly booed off stage after stage the last time they had toured together in 1966. There is a nervous edge to the whole thing—almost adversarial—and that fascinated me. It was a particular way of looking at that moment in his career which I hadn’t quite seen articulated before, and I was really pleased how it came out. 

CR: You should be. It seems that liner notes are entwined with the act of listening. How does that inform how you write for this medium? And how is the liner notes style distinct from criticism?

EN: In my initial discussions with Sony Legacy regarding the Dylan set, they were clear that for the purposes of this project I was an advocate for Dylan. Essentially it is not objective in the way a review might be. By taking on the assignment, you are agreeing that this is a worthy piece of art worth explicating. That’s the jumping off premise. And that was easy, because I did and do love that period and do think it is more than worth a truly in-depth exploration.

CR: Apparently so do many others.

EN: Apparently. But to your point, I do put on the music, and in my way try to match the feeling of the prose to the sounds on the reissue. For Live ’74, there is a kind of rolling, hard, almost metallic toughness to the music—the sound of the group really on a war footing. I tried to match that feeling in the prose—armored and tough, a little vulnerable, a little ironic. I wanted to imagine readers enjoying the music and feeling the words in the same kind of avalanche.

For Let It Be, I wanted to try and capture the feeling of wonder when you are young and realizing your true abilities and daring to make manifest what maybe you had only privately dreamed. The world of possibilities suddenly opening. The specific joy of that. So, for sure, I like to think of the writing and the listening working in tandem. 

CR: We’re in an era where everything is accessible, but context is often superficial to nonexistent. Which makes thoughtful curation more important. Does writing liner notes for a reissue feel like preservation, summation, resurrection? Or something else entirely?

EN: Ideally, it’s a little of each? The question you have to ask, if you are writing one of these things, is: “Why this reissue and why now? What can we extrapolate with the benefit of hindsight that wasn’t quite in view to us previously?” Sometimes those answers are fairly obvious and other times they aren’t. In the case of Let It Be, it seemed to me very clear that the record was at least in some ways a manifesto about outsiderdom: the poor and underprivileged, queer folks, women who liked punk rock but didn’t feel welcome by its more overly masculine rituals, those who have felt excluded in their lives by prejudice and institutions. It was an album that spoke to all of those people and said, basically, “fuck it, let’s do our own things and make our own world and never look back.”

CR: That’s a now kind of energy. Or at least it’s needed now.

EN: It seemed to me so touchingly resonant in our moment. So that was a major thrust of my writing. I think with liner notes, you strive to weave together the myth and reality in a manner that usefully informs the art. With the Replacements or Dylan, the lore is already so thick, you never quite know what you are mining. The truth or some ill-received distortion of the truth. Sorting through that detritus, that's a lot of it too, right?

CR: Having tackled Burroughs and now the Dead, I feel you. The deeper the lore, the bigger the excavation. Speaking of deep lore, Paul Williams—songwriter, performer, the nefarious Swan in Phantom of the Paradise—loved your liner notes. What does it mean to receive that validation from someone inside the music rather than outside it? As a musical artist yourself, does a songwriter’s endorsement feel different than a critic’s?

EN: Being acknowledged by Paul Williams was absolutely astounding wish fulfillment. One of these things that seems absurdly impossible. But to your point, acknowledgement from a great songwriter is a kind of high unlike any other. The other day, I was driving Paranoid Style drummer Jon Langmead to his flight at Reagan-National, and who should text me at that time but my buddy Patterson Hood from the Drive By Truckers who was like, “Damn! Love the new record.” Obviously, I drove off the road more than once, but Jon made his flight and I assume Patterson is fine too. I’m fine. But I do love being complimented by fellow songwriters.

CR: I’m glad you’re all OK. Well, except for Reagan. But he has an airport. And now it’s crystal ball time. Do you think there’s an end to liner notes as we knew them? Like Peak Oil, or accountability in governance? And if they do go away, what’s actually being lost? And what will fill that space? Three minute video hot takes? Or nothing at all?

EN: I hope liner notes don’t go away, but of course I don’t know. Really well-written liner notes have been a point of entry for me in so much of the music I love, be they anecdotal or academic or some combination of the two. My sincere hope is that with all of the access to art and information, there will become a greater and not a lesser audience for things that create the kind of context that streaming, for better or worse, basically avoids by default.

CR: Many artists and direct participants in these musical eras have left us or are passing on. And those tasked with contextualizing music, culture, and social movements may not have been around for the stuff being considered. Does any of this affect how you think about your role?

EN: I’ve always liked history. I've had a surprising number of people say to me, “how can you write with such authority about a Dylan tour that happened before you were born?” And I don’t mind the question, it’s not ill-intentioned, but it is a little insane to me. No one currently living was alive during the time of Napoleon, but it’s still useful to explain why invading Russia in winter is not the best idea. There are resources around this. There is War and Peace.

So, beats me as to where it is all headed, but my profound hope is that well written liner notes will not only continue to have value, but perhaps even the value of them will be greater as we proceed through the dense fog of everything all the time. It’s the Faulkner formulation: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” We can choose to think we are done with the past, but that choice isn’t ours to make, and the past is certainly not done with us.