by Tom Bosworth // April 17, 2020
“Motel 6” by River Whyless is in a totally different genre and struck me much more recently. I had most of their discography on repeat last fall, when I was slowly realizing that things with my partner were quickly slipping away. The slow friction of long distance was beginning to screech. The pace of the quarter system meant I couldn’t get away as often.
On the morning of my last visit to Bennington, we were listening to the album in his twin bed. The sun was coming through the east window. I hadn’t really listened to the words and none of the ugliness was apparent to me yet, but the first verse, “Long-time lover, have you gone? / I left you walking through / the parking lot of a Motel 6 / As I turned our van back east / Somewhere on the road we lost our way.” I thought the melody was nice, and it is, but I was slowly waking up to the whole song.
Sianne Ngai has a book called Ugly Feelings that gets at what kind of state I often listened to this song. The book is cool and important, but the introduction is what stuck out to me, the explanation of just what an uglyfeeling is: “unlike rage, which cannot be sustained indefinitely, less dramatic feelings like envy and paranoia have a remarkable capacity for duration. If Ugly Feelings is a bestiary of affects, in other words, it is one filled with rats and possums rather than lions, its categories of feeling generally being, well, weaker and nastier.”
I had Mitski, Bon Iver, and yes, “Heartbeat in the Brain” for the heartbreak: songs to listen to before, during, and after crying in the shower. But there’s another class of feeling— the ugly kind. It’s slower, more palatable to listen to while the 10º wind chill besieges the thinnest parts of you.
“Motel 6” is an ugly song then, an amalgamation of regret, inevitability, and slow loss. The chorus is desperate and uncertain: “In my mind / in my mind / I can save us all / I can breathe this all back to life.” But he can’t. The only things we know about the speaker is that he drives a van and he is leaving someone at a Motel 6. That doesn’t scream restorative power. Holding on and letting go are opposite actions, but I’m often trying to do both at once.
Coming “back east” is a retreat toward the old, the known, maybe even the comfortable. Something is always left behind in that movement. Writing about the album, Ryan O’Keefe remembers being broke after a tour, dropping one of the members off before she flew home: “Watching her check into the motel as we pulled away felt like an ending. It was as if I removed a pair of tunnel vision goggles and could see the world and my life for the first time since we started this band. I felt incredibly small, fragile, irresponsible, foolish, at a loss for what to do next and very alone.”
The chorus ends, “From a dream I’m waking up / And for the first time / I’m terrified of waking up alone. “I tried to use winterim to “get over it” but it simply wasn’t enough time. Still feeling the tequila heartburn from New Years, I slouched back East for Winter term and arrived to a dorm room practically haunted by better times. River Whyless became unlistenable.
I don’t understand it. I have a manuscript of poems about it, a weird creative non-fiction piece about it, and now a blog, at least partially, about it. Letting go and holding on are opposite things, but things always done together. I can listen again, though, and it’s as gorgeous as ever.