When reminiscing on bygone eras of pop music it’s tempting to divide them up into good versus bad, immortal singles versus formulaic chart filler. Beatles versus bubblegum. Punk versus disco. Nirvana versus … whatever “alternative rock” was supposed to be an alternative to. Years from now, music snobs will likely look back on the fight between the Lordes and Pharrells of the world and a thousand banjo-slinging Mumford & Sons rip-offs. Yet as much as stenciled bird artwork and flannel wearing troubadours make me cringe, I won’t dismiss the possibility that post-Mumford “indie pop” will come into its own, and much of the reason for this is American Authors’ “Best Day of My Life.”
I won’t pretend for a second that “Best Day of My Life” is anything more than a Frankenstein of “indie” music’s aesthetic touchstones. There’s a banjo, lyrics about “dancing with monsters” and “howling at the moon,” and wordless group chants designed for festival sing-alongs. The video is even worse, featuring a cuteish hipster dancing around Brooklyn with a guy in a Where The Wild Things Are like monster suit. Someone, whether the band or the A&R suits behind them, spent a lot of time crafting this product. But I’ll be damned if they didn’t do a good job. “Best Day of My Life” is a great single, an exemplary product of the pop-music machine.
It’s incredibly catchy, and pretty much any segment of the song could get stuck in the listener’s head with equal likelihood. While “it’s catchy” could validate the artistic merit of any pop song in a perfect world, it’s the subtleties that create the catchiness that make “Best Day of My Life” so great. Notice how everything except the drums and the vocals drop out during the last “li-i-i-i-i-i-i-ife” of the chorus. It only ups the intensity of the instrumental hook, which melodically ties into the vocal hook so well it’s almost impossible to get only the vocal hook stuck in your head.
Perhaps my favorite moment of the song is the entrance of the second chorus. It comes in slightly earlier than the first chorus. Most producers would have kept the verse-chorus distance the same on both, but this subtle decision makes a huge difference. It shears a bit of the song off, making it even more brief — and above all else — it makes the entrance of the second chorus even more grand. This is the sort of hyper-subtle trickery one might associate with the Beatles, not Mumford & Sons or fun. or anyone like that.
Though subtlety is a big part of the song’s appeal, “Best Day of My Life” is also uproariously and gloriously shameless. The list of indie-pop cliches is endless, but the songs are pulled off with such conviction they become less irritating than charming. There’s something beautiful about the nakedness of Zac Barnett’s first “whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh” — how certain he is that nonsense vocalization will work and how unafraid of embarrassing himself he seems as he screams it into the microphone.
American Authors doesn’t attempt at all to distract from or poke fun at the cliches they employ in this song. Rather, the band presented them in the most carefully crafted and pleasure-inducing way possible. Just about anyone reading this could probably buy a banjo and flannel, write a few songs about running around in the forest, and be a star in months. But American Authors truly care about their roots-y indie schtick — and if more of the world’s Mumford wannabes did the same, they could create pop music that’s not only lucrative but revered and respected.