Pain, desolation, the fragile nature of life. There to build us up, or tear us down. Kicking us in the lungs and socking another punch to the kidneys so that you'll bleed top and bottom for good measure. The universe is harsh if you allow it to take hold, and for stretches of time Hoen falls to this, and accepts it.
After the opening, the frustration bashing through the first page, things slide into a hazard as the memoir takes a cue and events unfold to colour the drive. Minutes run in to days, to weeks, his various bands on the road, paid in melted vinyls, if paid at all, and the hunger to get away from it all. The writing shows off a stark and beautiful desolation as it lays it down on the page, and done with a unabashed poetic license that never really seems far fetched or bent much beyond its truth.
Will and I awoke spooned on my mattress, dressed in ski hats and winter coats, and throughout the apartment every window had been opened wide. Apparently we'd decided that an evil had been turned loose; our only hope had been to cleanse the air as we lay shivering beside each other, awaiting the first light of the century.
Dearborn, Michigan hums along plenty between the breaks and dissolutions. It features enough that you get a sense of place and the locals that turn up, or at least the visage and their general behaviour, adding another layer to it all. Our environment builds us and frames our mind, and here it continues.
Sean Madigan Hoen uncovers a despair and honesty as he catches moments on the stage, unleashing raw emotional screams and throwing his lungs out into the audience. Vicious are the throng calling out the band's masculinity, even its ability to play a tune. More to it, the morning after, and the pounding bruises as a shortcut to feeling alive.
My arms were dotted with welts, my lips swollen with bite marks. Postshow mornings felt like I'd been mugged, and I reveled in each twinge, as if it fulfilled the idea that I could not be easily destroyed.
Between glimpses of euphoria, finding the spotlight and darkness, it's family. And family makes what is essentially the soundtrack to our lives. A longing for understanding of what's going on, how things will fall out and where in it all we fit, if we ever do. It's a question that Hoen doesn't outright call for, but it's there in its search and sitting by the hospital bed, or waiting to pick up the dad from rehab and then standing around at the open casket as the relatives wait outside.
It's Detroit during the 90s punk scene and for all the misery and hurt that steeps each chapter, there's a glimmer of something else waiting to turn the page. Bleak, but hopeful, or at least black in its humour, the moments unravel into a spiral of heavy after heavy.
In a way, it was true; there was death in everything I saw.
Songs Only You Know is a sharp written sadness that drags you down and props you up a few times to turn your head away from the vomit that splashes back.
The publisher, Soho Press, provided a review copy.
Reviewed on Friday, 23 May 2014