Jon Auer live at The Islington/You Used to Drive Me Around

The last time I saw Jon Auer play was with the Posies at the Reading Festival in 2001. They were on in the bigger of the two tents, in front of several thousand people. On Friday night I was among around 100 lucky souls who saw him play in the back room of a pub in Angel, a room where I played drums with Sumner about 8 months ago, in front of not many fewer than were there the other night.

Jon Auer, The Islington, 15/08/14. Photo courtesy of Katherine Mengardon/Jon Auer

Auer and his fellow Posie Ken Stringfellow are both very talented singer-songwriters and multi-instrumentalists. That had always been obvious. But while I knew that Auer was a really technically proficient guitarist, I didn’t realise quite how good he was until I watched him play electric guitar for 90 minutes from about 6 feet away, with no band behind him to help him fill space. He played magnificently. I’d been expecting a sit-down, acoustic, sensitive singer-songwriter set. He played acoustic a little, including a wonderful entirely unamplified version of Throwaway, but basically he gave us a rock show — without a band — that still managed to rock. There wasn’t a dull moment all evening.

I figured before the gig that I’d know a decent amount of the songs he’d play, since I’ve got the Posies’ first four albums (Failure, Dear 23, Frosting on the Beater and Amazing Disgrace) and one of the reunion discs (Every Kind of Light), and since it seemed that Auer hadn’t been quite as busy as Ken Stringfellow in the years between Posies activity (one solo album to KS’s three). In the event I knew maybe half the songs he played and was perplexed, albeit delighted, to realise that the songs I didn’t know (those off his solo record, the one he wrote for Big Star, a bunch of others — maybe from Posies EPs or that aren’t released yet) were even better than the ones I did.

Photo courtesy of Sue Edmond/Jon Auer

Having met him briefly after the set to tell him it was amazing and to verify that it was indeed him that popped up to school my ass in the comments section here, I dashed home and immediately scoured iTunes for what I’d missed out on. Particularly, I was looking for songs called Josephine and You Used to Drive Me Around. Both of these are on a solo album I was only dimly aware he’d released, Songs from the Year of Our Demise.

You Used to Drive Me Around has been killing me ever since.

It’s not a world away from what Auer used to do with the Posies: he still bases his guitar riffs on surprisingly out-there tunings, making them dark and grindy as much as they are sparkly and melodic; the drums are still prominent (mercifully left intact by the mastering job); he’s still one of the best harmony singers around. But there’s a weariness to his writing, to the performances, that I didn’t recognise from his earlier work.

Sometimes his lyrics are hard to parse, and while I don’t know and wouldn’t wish to speculate on who the subject of You Used to Drive Me Around is, the song seems very much to be going over emotional territory that’s familiar to me personally, which is doubtless one of the reasons it’s hit me so hard. Frankly, the third time I heard it on Friday night (which is to say, the second time I listened to the recorded version, when the line ‘You come clean and I’ll come closer’ suddenly hit me), it moved me to tears.

And I got to thinking, this record has existed for eight years, and I didn’t know about it. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know who Jon Auer was either. Sometimes it’s made clear to you, with all the people in the world making music — all the old favourites, the new favourites, the soon-to-be favourites, the people slogging away in practice rooms, and pub back rooms, the people who died 20 years ago — how much might be getting by you every day, and it’s pretty overwhelming. How much great art do we miss out on when we’re looking the other way?

The poster from the show – photo of Auer back in his Antonio Banderas-lookin’ days

Some recent work of mine!