Waxing Nostalgic: Nada Surf, “The Plan”

By Jeffery X Martin

Music in the Nineties wore its heart on its flannel sleeve. Once you got past how things smelled or how evenly they flowed, Nineties rock was a veritable LiveJournal of emotions. There were earnest, honest lyrics depicting difficult emotional situations, sometimes couched in the friendliest of music, sometimes buried under layers of compression and distortion.

Nada Surf had a bit of a different sound. The guitars were fuzzy and discordant, but singer Matthew Caws’s vocals were clean and clear; no Cobain mumble, no Cornell voicerobatics. When he poured out his angst, it was inescapable because it was right there. You could almost envision him in front of you, two shots into a bottle, hand shaking with frustration while his voice never quavered.

Their biggest hit was a song called “Popular,” a skewering of high school politics which is hilariously memorable for Caws yelling the phrase, “You’re so novel!”

As usually happens, though, the best song on the album never got any airplay. “The Plan” may be the most desperately appealing we-gotta-get-outta-this-place since The Animals sang “We’ve Got to Get Out of this Place.”

You’re in a town. Maybe it’s your hometown; maybe it’s a new place. It doesn’t matter. You’ve done your homework. You’ve felt it out. You know the score. And this place is not for you. In fact, Sweet Jesus, any place would be better. Everyone knows this is nowhere and nobody can do a damned thing about it. You’re tired. You’re close to beaten.

But you have an idea. It’s crazy, but it just might work. It might work in that way where you had a dream about your lousy AV connection that showed you how to fix your cables.

There’s a way to drive, I see it once in a while/I watch the tail lights and memorize. . .

That itching desire to leave without quite knowing how to do it is represented perfectly in this song. The galloping bass line, the frenetic guitar riff, the vocals that sound like he’s been thinking about it so long now, it’s all become rote: “The Plan” is the anthem that never found its way to the arena. It’s a white-knuckle trip to nowhere, one that ends unresolved, unfinished.

So were the Nineties. Nobody really wanted to be there. There was nothing to do, nowhere to go. We American kids loved President Clinton for getting blown in the Oval Office, but what else did we have? Operation Desert Strike and Oasis? Life after Cobain was a desert and anywhere was better than where you were, regardless of where that was.

I never got to read the plan.

Neither did we, Nada Surf. Neither did we.

Listen to Nada Surf’s “The Plan” and other songs from this series on the Waxing Nostalgic playlist! It’s on Spotify, it’s free and it’s eclectic, to say the very least. Give it a shot!