by Kevin McKinney
I have a page in my notebook titled “list of rhetorical questions in A.M.’s I saw first light.” Sure enough, it’s filled to the margins, though I’ll admit my notebook has small pages. I guess I’m not sure if McClellan’s questions really are rhetorical, or if I used the wrong term. Does a rhetorical questioner need to know the answer? Because McClellan’s questions never answer themselves; they often lead to a contradiction, a Yes and No.
As a lyricist, McClellan deals with specificity and small moments. She chronicles careful shades of thought and feeling better than just about anyone. But her songs aren’t solipsistic for a second; they’re never turned strictly inward. She’s constantly orienting us towards her life as experienced in the world, which includes politics and injustice, dead-end jobs, sexism, and border walls. I saw first light is packed with big, dramatic arrangements, the kind that make me believe again in the long tradition of rock n roll as something that breaks free of the individual, turning one person’s voice into the crowd’s anthem. When McClellan asks “Veronica, why is life so damn hard?”, we’re all asking with her.
I’ve had a question of my own bumping around my head over the last few months. I don’t quite have the words for it, but it’s something like: is it selfish to have a broken heart? This year has been damn hard for me, for reasons that sometimes are and sometimes aren’t adjacent to the reasons it’s been damn hard for everyone. Is it okay for me to be bummed about love or to stress about my career or to fret about whether you think I’m a good writer when, say, 250,000 people have died from COVID-19 in America? I really don’t know the answer to this. There’s not a good way to balance it all. So I listen to Anna McClellan as she sings “it’s the world of the world as we know it and I feel just fine,” and her voice cuts through all the song’s rising noise. When R.E.M. sings that line, it’s about detachment, or it’s about masking fear. When McClellan sings it, the “feel” doesn’t describe an emotional state but a capacity to connect. And when I listen to I saw first light, that feels like an answer for the time being.