Musician "in on the joke"
A review of High on Stress

-- Bob Longmore

I moved to Minnesota in 1997. More precisely, I moved to northeast Minneapolis to a duplex with three roommates. A beer soaked, tumultuous time in my mid-twenties; I will always have a place in my heart for the dark, dingy Northeast bars. The Premium on tap and the old-timers perched on their barstools; the no frill rock and roll I found in the clubs and in the record stores; that Minnesota sound: Equal parts earnestness and attitude.

I first found High on Stress at one of those Northeast bars. Maybe that is part of the reason they bring me back to those days when I was first learning the streets of the Twin Cities. They have that sound I love. There are no overproduced hollow vocals, no electronic blips and beeps, no filler; they are what rock and roll sounds like in my head when I think of rock and roll. Their sound hovers somewhere between Paul Westerberg-influenced rock and Son Volt-inspired alt-country.

Many of the songs on their album Moonlight Girls could have been the soundtrack to my Northeast years. Like on “Cash Machine” where Leet sings about the internal strife that scraping by month to month can cause:

Where’s it go, when the money’s gone?
Try to figure out where the hell I went wrong
Half is spent before you pay the rent
Half is spent before the money’s sent
Don’t it make your blue eyes red?

Leet is honest and open when he talks about the time in his life that inspired these songs. Having just left the band he was in for seven years and breaking up with his girlfriend, he found himself in a low place. "I moved into a studio apartment by myself and ate a lot of McDonald’s, slept on the floor and played solitaire. For the first couple of months, I barely touched my guitar."

He eventually did regain his musical ambition. "[I] started to write songs about how I was feeling about the end of the band situation and the constant on-again, off-again relationships [with the band and his girlfriend]." Around this time, two friends of Leet’s died in a car accident. Leet was scraping by just to pay the rent. "There was really just a lot of crap going on in my life at the time."

Leet is from Minot, a town he refers to as "a dead-end street for a lot of music lovers or job opportunists." On the song "Minot" he sings,

This is an ode to cover bands
Bad punk rock
And a town I can’t stand

I can sympathize with the desire never to go home, with the feeling that here in Minneapolis is where I belong—where I should have been all along.

Of course, there are pervasive themes of lingering heartbreak and heartache. On "No Such Thing as an Easy Break," Leet attempts to make peace with his demons — a peace that is necessary just to move on:

Can't say I didn’t see it coming
Doesn't make it hurt any less
She says, "I still love you
Just not the way that you want me to"
She says she still cares
But how am I supposed to feel

Then Leet lets go with the punch line that every self-doubting person on the bad end of a breakup repeats in their head as they replay the events, "She said that all along."

On "Gold Star," the lyrics reflect the instability of life. Set against an organ-laden bed of countrified melancholy, Leet sings:

Sometimes you have to let go
To find out what you're looking for
With your car crash romances
And a year in review

And then, having talked to the band and after seeing them live, the line that I think sums up their attitude, "You come to expect it / The dark comedy of love and life."

Leet, as the front man, has the skill and passion to pull you into his world of women, booze and desperation; but at the same time, has the lightheartedness to laugh between the songs, to let the audience know that he is in on the joke too. The joke: That life sucks a lot of the time. But there are things that make it worth living, like singing in a rock and roll band.