Song of the Week Late Edition - "If You Wanna" by The Vaccines

Song of the Week will be a weekly (really?) feature on Stetson’s Garden. I absolutely love listening to music, and more than that, I love sharing music I love with other people. So, I plan on showcasing one song at the end of each week and writing about why I love it, why I felt the need to share it, why I 
think it is a special song worth sharing.

Take it as a given that every one of the songs I post to this site have spent at least 48 straight hours bouncing around mind head on constant repeat. I, being the kind of person who consumes music by sporadically binging on iTunes gift cards, was very much late in obtaining the debut album of The Vaccines (somewhat eponymously titled What Did You Expect From The Vaccines?), but the album, and this song, became instant favorites of mine. I heard "If You Wanna" on the radio, and could not get it out of my head until I had listened to the song about 100 times over the course of a week.

For some reason when I listen to The Vaccines, I imagine myself at a Ramones concert, just an extremely, extremely slowed down, toned down version of a Ramones concert. I understand that I am stretching a bit far, very far perhaps, but the songs of The Vaccines have a consistent beat that keeps heads bobbing and a simple, but electrifying sound to them. The on-beat drumming and the eighth note bass-strumming keep the energy flowing behind the lyrics and the intermittent guitar solos that give listeners of what will hopefully be The Vaccines’ trademark sound.

“If You Wanna” is a versatile song. Play it in the morning and wake up ironically (in the truest sense of the word). Play it on a treadmill for some needed pep. Play it while walking through the park and staring at the leaves and understand its depth. I think that depth is an interesting term when applied to music. A song can be considered deep for its lyrics or for its sound. Certainly any competent four piece rock band can achieve depth of sound by layering multiple instruments on top of one another, with each doing different, but related things. But lyrical depth is harder to achieve. Talking about whatever and then ending each line with a rhyme is a lot easier than constructing a meaningful, flowing lyric.

And I think The Vaccines achieve a level of lyrical depth quite successfully. They string together a group of wonderfully paradoxically verses about a man dealing with a recent break-up. All throughout the song, we see a play on the traditional morose and stubborn rock ‘n roll character who doesn’t wanna wake up in the morning. But as the song progresses, this man comes to a realization. The “All-Alone” interlude of the song, which is best listened to while witnessing a lone orange leaf tumble through the air to land inconsequently on the ground during one’s peaceful walk through the park, reveals to listeners an important lesson. Perhaps that we can’t control what other people wanna do and we will have to do things that he does not wanna do in order to continue with life. But only, y’know, if you wanna.