Everclear: Songs From an American Movie Vol. One: Learning How to Smile

It ain't exactly my favorite pizza topping, but I can stomach pretty much anything - and the way a pie washes down easy with chilly beer... So here I am staring down the cover of this Andrew Wyeth mocking Songs From an American Movie Vol. One: Learning How to Smile - and I am smiling.

Having been coaxed to this smirk rather than taught, Everclear has me sorta bopping and hamming things up in a your-best-friends-paunch-bellied-dad style. Lightweight? Hard to tell with music that's so damn catchy. It is also difficult to balance sentimental reminiscing, and Art Alexakis controls it so brilliantly with the songs he's crafted as a getaway from the grunge sponge. Craft being the key.

Sorting out life is shitty business at most turns, but when Alexakis digs deep into his acceptance of the felicity that his turbulent youth spawned (on the hippity-hoppity of "AM Radio") and then reflects earnestly on the ultimate responsibility that beams from the face of his child - well, the cynic in you has to stand up and say "maud-fucking-lin!" But then you listen to the pure auto-bio pourin'-it-all-out sobriety, the balls-to-you-all honesty, and, well fuck, you gotta feel something...don't ya? This stuff is too steeped in the ambitious beauty of American music, nodding and winking it's way through an apparent love affair with the sounds that poured through Alexakis' ears and into his soul leaving a haunting seed.

Songs From an American Movie is a personal statement - check that, statement is too cold, this is a personal journey - shot cathartic-like through mic's, wires, and amps. Art Alexakis is close in age to myself, and I think - I get the feeling - we've come of shared experience. In fact, when he sings "we need to slow down for awhile" in "Thrift Store Chair", he may as well be singing to all of us who made our way through the murky gap between the Baby Boomers and the Gen X'ers - the forgotten generation. The span who weren't even whispered the promise of a better future, but rather were slapped with the fear of a nuclear youth and the possibility of a crumbling American Dream turned myth.

Kinda sucked, didn't it? No wonder we all fell in line when Westerberg ached poetic about being unsatisfied - hell, we felt it too. We lived it. So did Alexakis I am sure. But turning the corner now, where we all seem to be these days, perhaps we're stronger for it. Because within all of the uncertainty, underneath the "nothing to look forward to" prophecies of our youth, we've forged a better sense of culture and community. We've gone forward on our own and captured something in essence to mark a sub-cultural generation of peoples who remain independently linked. We came from nowhere and arrived here at somewhere with a better sense of who we are and how to survive. I like my friends, and the more people I meet from my so-called generation, the more proud I am of the mark it is leaving.

Art Alexakis just happens to make records for a living, and Songs From an American Movie is how he copes with this ideal.

I think that's pretty fucking cool.