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“Hold My Life” – The Replacements
(Words/music: Paul Westerberg, available on Tim, Sire Records 1985)

I hold the Replacements so dearly because I fell in love with the band as a teenager.  I went out on the afternoon of my first date in high school and bought a copy of Tim. I can’t remember why – if I went out specifically to buy it, or if I was going out to blow off steam and came across it incidentally.  Regardless, I have a vivid memory getting ready for the homecoming dance with the first two thirds of Tim playing in the boombox next to me.  I remember the circumstances behind the acquisition of most of the Replacements records I own in fact, but my association with Tim stays with me the most.  Today I wonder if Tim is my favorite Replacements album because it has my favorite songs on it, or if it has my favorite songs on it because of the numerous personal connections I have with the album. 

I share this because my experience with The Replacements isn’t unique to either the band or the teenage experience.  We all have song bound to specific times in our lives, and it just seems that the Replacements wrote many songs that lend themselves to this hyper-sensitive period in our lives.  I spent too long tonight trying to track down the source (even stumbling on another instance where I paraphrased it), and I’m fairly sure it’s in my missing copy of Our Band Could Be Your Life, but the best description I’ve ever heard of The Replacements was that Paul Westerberg wrote vividly about the teenage experience from the safety of the “other side” of adolescence.  Appropriately enough, it’s something that I appreciate more as I get further away from my teenage years.  It reminds me of the predicament Holden Caulfield thrusts himself on at the end of The Catcher in the Rye.  Impetuous Holden tells his sister that he wants to be the one who wants to protect kids from getting hurt or going down the wrong path.  He doesn’t realize that it’s a foolish pursuit; first, it’s near impossible, and moreover kids need to learn how to fall and recover.  Yes, there are certain mistakes kids can and should avoid, but some struggles, such as heartbreak, rejection, or frustration, are necessary.  Learning to grow up is to learn to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and continue on, and without the opportunity to fall (in relative safety), it’s impossible to learn how to get back up. To paraphrase Westerberg’s narrator in this song, they need to learn how to use their lives rather than merely hold onto them indefinitely.

The point is that no matter how much we want to intervene, there are some mistakes, injuries, and failures that we all must experience, and the only reason we feel qualified to guide others is that we have the benefit of hindsight and experience.  This is what makes Westerberg’s perspective work – he strikes the right balance between experience and authenticity, knowing where to nudge the listener and where to just lay out all his cards and let the listener take stock of the situation.  His songs aren’t judgmental or didactic as much as they are reflective.  We can see ourselves in the bored, frustrated, alienated, and hopeful personalities that populate Replacements’ songs, and perhaps with Westerberg’s mirror we can take better stock of ourselves and where we fit in to the big picture.  Rather than offering advice quickly tuned out, Replacements songs like “Hold My Life” wait passively for the next person to come along and find whatever he or she needs – empathy, understanding, catharsis, validation, or whatever – ready to help on the listener’s terms.  Mark Richardson, in a review of the Replacements’ reissues, put it well by saying that records, particularly the ‘Mats records, are always waiting.  “People change, but records don’t, and that’s part of what makes them great. They’re frozen in place, ready to be found by people who need them.”

More on The Replacements: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm