There’s Nothing Else

Built to Spill “Never Be the Same”

Doug Martsch has spent so much time working on big lumbering epics hat it’s a really nice change of pace for him to put out a relatively simple, jangly folk rock song like this. All of his songs are very tightly written, even when they seem to jam out a bit, but this one feels especially compact – it wouldn’t surprise me at all if this was revised several times until it was nothing but hooks. The lyrics seem straightforward but are just as deceptively clever as the music itself, with Martsch flipping the perspective on his subject’s wanderlust and relationship with time and change every few lines. I particularly enjoy the idea of zooming in on someone’s motivation to keep doing new things and zooming out on a world that only changes at a glacial pace. This isn’t a new theme for him, though. His best song ever ends on essentially the same thought: “This history lesson doesn’t make any sense in any less than ten thousand year increments.”

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