This shy blog has never sought the stature or repute of the heroic. The music, after all, is not all about us. But we also never have, nor will, shirk the heroic alms that are sometimes, rarely maybe, due us. Some of those alms arrive in the form of double orange vinyl. Some in double blue.
Say Zuzu were our first serious indie love of a band—edging out by a few slim years the Trashcan Sinatras, whom we previously wrote about at great length. Zuzu fired up their attempt at Doing It, by which is generally meant making a living as a band, in the mid-1990s. They were a locally-contained New Hampshire act, nestling first into the nomenclature somewhere close to Folk Rock (a term still painful to type.) New Hampshire, as we all know, is small enough to border on trifling.
And then, with a rush and a push and a breakthrough album and a breakdown bus, they began to tour widely and play loudly.
The new album released in 1995 was called “Highway Signs and Driving Songs,” and maybe could have been called “Driving Songs and Highway Signs,” or even “Highway Songs” if they had been going for something a little more polished. They weren’t. The folk rock was shipped off in a packing-taped box down to the minors in Pawtucket, never to be heard from again. “Highway Signs” was an excellent album, full of implied momentum that was well-suited to its asphalt title. On the musical side, they seemed to solve—permanently—an identity issue by layering snarls of lead guy Jon Nolan’s electric guitar over a base coat of acoustic rhythm guitar work. This would end up being the Zuzu Sound, pretty much right up until just before the very end. And maybe the appendices will provide some insight into what happened then.
It was around “Highway Signs” time, during College Years, that Amber Soles first attended a couple of Zuzu shows and memorized the album. Still early in training as Indie Oracle, we were subtle if persistent when it came to showing Say Zuzu off to friends and acquaintances. It was just one album, right?
Our professional schooling shortly thereafter is when things got interesting. On the heels of “Highway Signs and Driving Songs” came “Take These Turns” and “Bull,” two albums that reached marked new highs of melody, songwriting, and studio execution. We found ourselves in the era of Peak Zuzu, which helpfully coincided with professional school parties and legal drinking age.
Peak Zuzu also meant tours—tours that swooped down from uptight New England to grind through Appalachia, the South and Midwest. Now firmly ensconced as tastemakers, we at the blog drove groups of friends from a home base in the Piedmont of North Carolina to see Zuzu play in Boone, NC, and then some many months later to Charleston, West Virginia. The latter trip involved leaving after work hours, driving to a downtown bar two states away by mid-evening, seeing the show, and then driving back overnight while one over-indulged member of the friend group puked out the window of my moving car. We arrived back home at 4am and went back in to work at 7. Why we didn’t think to just have a trash bag in the car, I still cannot explain.
“Take These Turns” is now The Lost Album, failing for eons to appear even on contemporary streaming services. It is also, band opinion notwithstanding, Zuzu’s finest hour. It is now booked for release in January 2025 in glorious double blue vinyl. And this is where the axe grinds.
The album opens with a ripper, The Farm, which is nearly all-electric and includes the gauntlet-throwing free verse line about staring “at the banjo in the corner…think I might pick it up.” Spoiler alert: they picked up the banjo. That part comes later, and is leaden with importance. Right on the heels of The Farm was 14 Other Ways, which remains one of the strongest radio-single-type songs the band ever made. And hell yes, there was a banjo in the song to great effect—but hold tight, readers, for not even this great song was the important banjo moment.
By track four we arrive at title track “Take These Turns” which is pretty much the only song from this album to lodge itself permanently in Say Zuzu playlists. It’s a phenomenal alt-country creation, much like the album as a whole. The entire album percolates with peddle steel and fiddle, along with some game-raising drumming and percussion, and the whole thing seems welded together by the bottled magic that most bands never have the luck to uncork. And then there is Broken.
Broken is the finest song that Say Zuzu have ever made, and the margin is wide. This is not because the rest of the band’s output hasn’t been great—it generally has been. It is because Broken is a work of special brilliance. It was designed to be the closing song on ”Take These Turns”, but the band tacked on a very good bonus track that they recorded while touring. Perhaps losing formal position as album closer is what caused the short shrift that has now reached our website.
Broken is defined by a baseline and an accompanying banjo run, a poignant setting for some of Jon Nolan’s best singing. We have listened to this song hundreds of times now over dozens of years, and it still isn’t clear what is broken—if it’s a person or a relationship, or both. It doesn’t matter. Nolan’s voice promises “warmth and compassion” and the proliferating banjo and pedal steel, combined with some achingly beautiful falsetto, deliver. For long stretches of the song, the effect is that the banjo might be the only thing holding the relationship, or maybe just the narrator, together.
This song is an all-timer, something that would be comfortably and assuredly seated at the King’s Table of the genre, with stuff like Neko Case’s Hold On, Hold On, Whiskeytown’s Jacksonville Skyline, and Wilco’s Spiders (Kidsmoke.)
So some years later it is 2019, and we have heard of a Say Zuzu reunion show, and have made travel arrangements to get from All Points West to New Hampshire, and back, all in a total of 60 hours. From the moment we learned of the concert, Broken loomed large in our daydreams. Would they have banjo available? Would they even play anything from “Take These Turns” besides the title track? It was an all-consuming internal drama during the cross-country flight and during the lobster roll and Moxie late lunch before the show.
Say Zuzu played a hell of a show on October 26, 2019. They played for what I think was at least three hours. They ran out of songs to play that they had rehearsed. Broken wasn’t one of them.
Pretty drunk and pretty tired, we danced through the entire show. Strangers, probably also pretty drunk, thought we were cute. Confidence levels were high. Nolan, hunting for ideas for what additional songs to play as the show wound down, turned to the audience and was taking requests. We saw an opening and shot our shot: “BROKEN!”
Record scratch. Silence. Then Nolan, in front of God and hundreds of drunken concert goers:
“Broken?!? Who said Broken?!?” It is possible that our sheepish hand(s) went up. It seems unlikely that a stage light was redirected onto us in the audience, now marooned and helpless as the audience parted between us and the lead man.
Nolan proceeded to recount an anecdote about the band’s Italian manager (it is possible, if unlikely, that he recounted this so that the audience knew that at one time, his band was kicking so much ass that it needed a manager in Italy.) The anecdote was about the manager hating this song.
Whatever. The anecdote about Fusili the music critic fell flat and disappeared into the audience din. We tried to answer with a justification but our words were likewise hobbled by the din, and all Nolan could say in reply was that we bought our ticket(s) so we could say whatever we wanted. He thought we were complaining, when we were just trying to point out that Fusili was wrong and that Broken was the best thing Nolan had ever written (and that includes the two solo albums we had also memorized, and the one we wrote about.)
A stranger next to us offered condolences for the harrowing moments in the spotlight.
The world ended a few months later. Lockdowns and isolation and obviously a complete lack of rock shows and impromptu cross country trips for Moxie. We returned to our humble keyboard and waited for the next fun thing.
Back in the day, Say Zuzu had followed up “Take These Turns” with two more albums, “Bull” and “Every Mile” both of which were likewise luminescent, and both of which, combined with the others, provided musical accompaniment to huge swaths of life.
So lo and behold, in the Spring of 2022 a streaming service informed us—based upon our prodigious Zuzu listening footprints—that the band were emerging from history and lavishing upon the world a quite beautifully-presented Best Of album. Lovely cover art, and the option to purchase in double orange vinyl. It was a big moment. The streaming service had only one song listed as a first single and promotional release. The rest of the tracks were a mystery. We scrambled to a music merchandise website to find the track listing. A guffaw.
Track 5: Broken.
The song that wasn’t good enough to rehearse for the big reunion event, the song that was slandered by the Italian band manager, the song which provoked an actual shunning of up-and-coming fine music appreciating bloggists who had flown across the country and imbibed a Moxie. The song which had been sung out loud in bedrooms and cars hundreds of times, and even played on our humble independent radio show across the mesas of western Colorado.
Nolan, I fucking knew this was your best song way before you did.
Snows is your second best. You’re welcome.
Everyone who reads this: buy every goddam thing Say Zuzu has ever made. Just don't trust their taste in their own songs until you give them a few years to think over their answers.
