Metro Pulse/Music/Glossary

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What:
Glossary with Passport Again, the Damn Creeps, and Modern Machines

When:
Saturday, Jan. 24, 9 p.m.

Where:
The Pilot Light

Cost:
$5

Glossary deconstructs the meaning of headlights to define the meaning of home

by Leslie Wylie

What appropriately frustrated Knox-civilian can resist indulging in the occasional "Let's get the heck out of Dodge" fantasy? Who hasn't entertained, in their darkest moments of annoyance, the idea of watching the Sunsphere shrivel into a teeny, golden speck in their car's rearview mirror?

Escapism is one subject that local music will never tire of. Todd Steed's new Knoxville girls got out a long time ago; Scott Miller's ideal departure involved a cloud of dust, a 50-cent lighter and a whisky buzz; and Dixie Dirt seems to have decided that perhaps geography isn't the cure. But songs flickering with the red glow of an exit sign, and the chronic restlessness that inspires them, are far from unique to Knoxville.

With bruised lyrics and a gutsy, Americana-fueled indie sound, Murfreesboro band Glossary offers a stockpile of rollickingly disenchanted anthems that will resonate with anyone anywhere who knows that you can't run away from your problems but keeps one eye on the highway anyway. "Hold me down if I start running/ Tie me up so I won't move/ Because these days I don't find nothing funny/ It's hard to get over something when it keeps following you," ruminates singer/songwriter Joey Kneiser in "Remember Me Tomorrow Tonight" from How We Handle Our Midnights, Glossary's third full-length album released May 2003 on Undertow Records.

"Overall, all the songs are about coming to realize that a lot of the ideals that you grew up thinking were true are not important or insignificant," Kneiser says. "Getting out of college, getting married, having kids and a house in the suburbs... it's all bullcrap and uninspiring. The songs are about trying to figure out some kind of sense of purpose for yourself without have having to conform to anything."

For the stuck, Glossary offers a constellation of highways but concludes that distance offers no relief from self-made black holes. For the broken-hearted, it offers the possibility that loneliness can be poetry but concludes that, in the long run, hitchhiking is better than traveling alone. It's songwriting delivered with the kind of hard-won sincerity that stems from years of cyclical resistance and acceptance, of sifting the fact from the fiction of Glossary's identity—which meant coming to terms with its Southern context.

Kneiser explains that, for the most part, Glossary's members—Bingham Barnes (bass), Greg Jacks (guitar/vocals), Kelly Smith (vocals/percussion), Todd Beene (guitar/pedal steel/keys) and JD Reager (drums)—share musical beginnings that embraced punk, hardcore, anything that distanced them from their immediate musical environments. Glossary's sense of geographical detachment was only in its beginning stages of breakdown when the group, or an initial incarnation of the group, assembled in 1997 to record Southern By the Grace of Location.

"You grow up and listen to this music and you try to rebel from it, but then you go back and start seeing its merit," Kneiser says, citing Neil Young, Gram Parsons, Woodie Guthrie, Shane Macgowan and Bob Dylan as major influences. "That's what attracted me more to songwriting, to songs written with more a purpose or some kind of lesson to tell."

Although Kneiser describes Glossary as "a rock band that just happens to be from the South," he only half-heartedly shrugs off the alt-country label that any band within a 50-mile radius of Nashville runs the risk of getting saddled with.

"Nashville sucks," Kneiser says. "It's the worst town to get people to come out and see you in. It is good that we are next to one of the major music meccas, but it's just like L.A. It's a bunch of industry people that go out and wheel and deal, and everybody there is out to make it big in the scene."

Calling Murfreesboro home has its own challenges. Middle Tennessee State University, Ivy League for recording industry hopefuls, makes the area a revolving door of bands. While it has yielded some notable ones (the Features, The Katies), Kneiser says that time has a tendency to separate the ashes from the sparks.

"The thing about Murfreesboro is that everyone who lives here is a musician, so there's millions of bands. It's a pretty tight music scene but there aren't a lot of good bands, and we've seen so many of them come and go. There are only a handful of bands that are really good and doing it for the right reasons," he says.

Touring has been more of the Glossary's style lately, anyway. A recent string of shows with Lucero meant exposure to big crowds and some much-appreciated time on the road, a chance to reconnect with its revered highways. Glossary, a band that simultaneously embraces and rejects the illusionary nature of escape, is still researching the effects of perspective, and the creative process through which they are redefining the distance between "here" and "somewhere else" is definitely one worth paying attention to.