“Yeah and also, we make music that is big and sometimes grand, and I feel like when people make music like that the tendency is to make these huge overblown romantic statements and often writing about being a teenager, or being sad growing up in your small town, or whatever. And I feel like as much as that resonates with a part of me still, I feel there aren’t a lot of people who make big beautiful [music] that is made for people that are my age. I want to write music for people who are adults, or from the perspective of an adult. Because it just seems cloying and fake to write music about being a sentimental teenager when I haven’t been one for a long time.”

Zac Pennington of the Parenthetical Girls, as interviewed by John Norris in Interview Magazine. This is one of the things that really sets Pennington apart from so many of his peers as a writer—he’s pushing himself to write unmistakably adult songs while working within a tradition (indie-pop) that fetishizes childhood and naiveté. I sometimes like to think of the characters in Parenthetical Girls songs as grown-up versions of the awkward teens you find in, say, Belle & Sebastian or Smiths songs. They’ve grown up but they’ve dragged all their inadequacies, neuroses and vulnerabilities into adulthood with them.

Also, I’m pretty amused by the fact that John Norris—who I watched on MTV as a kid—has become one of the few critics out there championing the Parenthetical Girls (he also recently interviewed Zac for NoiseVox). It’s comforting to know that at least some of your childhood heroes are still as discerning as you remember them—Matt Pinfield, it turns out, has insufferably boring taste.

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Notes

  1. mehan posted this