My tenuous relationship with Train – a perennial love-to-hate band for me, occupying the rarefied plane of existence that is home to the likes of Nickelback, Kid Rock, and every post-post-post-grunge also-ran ever – began inauspiciously, in 1998. Young and awkward at the time, I mostly kept to myself the eclecticism I now wear like a badge; my dad presented me with classic rock, the radio presented me with the wonderfully weird and one-hit-wonder-strewn landscape of the late-’90s pop boon, and from my classmates at school I received a steady IV drip of all the latest hip-hop. Nothing was off-limits; not even Train, that ragtag gaggle of down-home Southern-fried roots-rockers from the small Georgia town of… uhm, San Francisco. In 1998, their single “Meet Virginia” began to creep into the national lexicon, eventually peaking at 20 on the Hot 100; it was here that I, always hungry for new music to discover and eagerly pick apart, toyed with the idea of being a Train fan.

Now, bear with me; please understand the context. This was almost 20 years ago. There was no way for me to know what Train would become. Train have spent, charitably, a full fifteen years being aggressively, hilariously bad; but we’re here to talk about the Train of 1998, who were aggressively… well, boring.

I feel like I owned Train’s debut self-titled record. I feel like I heard “Meet Virginia”, enjoyed it, and decided to get in on the ground floor by purchasing their debut; it should be noted, however, that I have no way to confirm or deny this. I don’t have an actual recollection of any album I owned that wasn’t truly memorable to me; to put this in perspective, I can confirm beyond a doubt that I owned Sugar Ray’s 14:59, Hootie and the Blowfish’s Cracked Rear View, and at least one record by portly white blues guitarist Popa Chubby. Train’s debut is so bland and also-ran – but relatively competent, by their lofty standards of being the The Room of music – that, as I listen to it on Spotify for the purposes of this series, I genuinely can’t tell if I’m revisiting it or simply visiting it.

While Train would eventually forge their own unique artistic identity – one that is the aural equivalent of driving a screwdriver into your own temple, sure, but an identity nevertheless – the Train of their debut sounds… well, an awful lot like The Black Ctowes. Before lead singer Pat Monahan would become guilty of some of the worst synapse-firing scattershot lyrical bon mots in pop music history, he was simply a frontman, tasked with assigning words and melody to a fistful of workaday barroom rockers. For the most part, he manages this on Train without unleashing reams of astounding unchecked idiocy; in fact, it’s only “Meet Virginia” that hints at the band Train would become, what with its overly-precious first-person description of falling in love with an emotionally-trying Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype. It’s telling that, for better or for worse, it’s the only song on the record that distinguishes itself from the pack; why, if I were a more cynical fellow, I might be inclined to think that once Train realized that they’d hit upon a formula that worked, they built a career out of trying to return to the well and recapture the magic.

And, yeah: it’s probably a pretty bad song, in retrospect. It’s less of a character study, and more of a checklist of quirks; Monahan conveys that he’s in love with Virginia, and proceeds to rattle off a rundown of her idiosyncrasies, without ever bothering to clue us in as to why these are desirable qualities. Like, put it this way: in high school, I had an unrequited crush on a girl who wore her hair in twin Minnie Mouse buns and had an affinity for parachute pants. And one day, we’re walking down the hall, and she just begins to run from left to right and back again, leaping into the air after each cross and clicking her heels together. When I finally asked what she was doing, she paused, looked me in the eye, and proclaimed “I’m leprechaun-ing!” as though it were the most normal thing in the world. And my attraction, instead of coming back down to earth with a flat “oh, so you’re just being weird for attention”, soared even higher, because only in youth does that sort of thing inspire a crush. So “Meet Virginia”, a song that I’ll admit to enjoying at age 14, rings unbearably hollow as a married adult with a child and a job; it’s little more than an out-of-body romance with no actual meat on its bones. Picturing Monahan’s wry smirk at a paramour who “wears high heels when she exercises” and “only drinks coffee at midnight” is too much, because in reality those things are absurd and impractical. How are you exercising effectively in high heels? Is there an ensemble that requires the high heels, and why doesn’t Virginia wear gym shorts like people who actually exercise? Outside of the obvious comfort factor, won’t that ultimately wreak havoc on Virginia’s ankles, leading to an inevitable inability to exercise at all? And why coffee exclusively at midnight? Setting aside the clear shambles Virginia’s sleep schedule must be in – does Virginia not have a job? – wouldn’t it be simply impractical to turn down coffee in the morning merely out of a stubborn desire for nonconformity? These are the questions that Monahan should be asking, but like a teenager, he’s simply too swayed by the unconventional to realize that her behavior is erratic and head-scratching. This is the sort of thing that leads you to fall in love with girls who say things like “I’m so random! Everyone’s always talking about how random I am!”

I guess, in a sense – and, buckle in, because yes I’m going to continue to talk about “Meet Virginia” because you’re witnessing someone realizing in real-time that it is a baffling and profoundly stupid song – this song is an intriguing piece of the puzzle that is Train. My theory – and bear with me here – is as follows: Monahan is not the narrator of “Meet Virginia”, HE IS VIRGINIA. This explains his gradual shift into complete lyrical lunacy over the course of I’m-not-sure-how-many-but-definitely-too-many studio albums. Over the course of his entire career, he’s been slowly unspooling clues to his psyche, and basically everything that’s happened after “Hey Soul Sister” is the Shyamalan-esque reveal that he was Virginia the whole time; he’s the Manic Pixie Dream Guy, a weirdo who smooths over a cavernous lack of substance by being flagrantly, head-scratchingly strange in the hopes that the masses will mistake his non sequitur witticisms for profound insight. “Meet Virginia” is the opening salvo, Monahan lovingly describing this empty bag of quirk with what he imagines – or perhaps merely hopes – is fondness and reverence. Tellingly, Monahan mixes himself up with Virginia early on, dismissing it out of hand and moving on to the next thing: “she smokes a pack a day – wait, that’s me, but anyway”, which is basically like that moment in The Stepfather where Terry O’Quinn forgets who he’s serial killing this week.

Okay. So we’ve covered “Meet Virginia”, but there are technically other songs on this album, albeit none that–

YOU KNOW WHAT I’M NOT DONE. We need to discuss how hollow the narrative of “Meet Virginia” truly is. Reading the lyric sheet, it’s abundantly clear that each peccadillo of “Virginia’s” personality only exists because it rhymes with another thing. It’s unnatural. There’s literally nothing about it that isn’t unbearably phoned in; it’s just the first in a long line of tired Pat Monahan lyrical exercises. Virginia “wears high heels when she exercises” because the previous line is about her “[loving] babies and surprises.” Her confidence is tragic, but only because her intuition is magic. The worst verse in this thing is the one where Monahan RUNS DOWN A LIST OF QUIRKS AND OCCUPATIONS OF HER ENTIRE IMMEDIATE FAMILY, and THEY ONLY DO STUFF THAT RHYMES WITH THE OTHER STUFF THEY DO. “Daddy wrestles alligators, mama works on carburetors, her brother is a fine mediator…” I could deal with that. I can suspend my skepticism long enough to accept that they do that stuff (EVEN THOUGH THEY DEFINITELY DON’T) in service of Monahan’s Dr. Suess-ification of Virginia’s family. But then – THEN – Monahan has the audacity to set up these lines as the A-rhyme before rhyming “president” with “president”. BRUH. You can’t ask the listener to blindly accept stuff in service of the rhyme and then ABANDON THE CONCEPT OF RHYMING ALTOGETHER.

Like don’t make the brother a mediator for the president if you can’t rhyme anything with president. Make him a mediator for a legal practice or something. If you’re gonna try and flex lyrical on this thing, at least do your best to sell it. Okay. I’m done. I’m done.

So that’s “Meet Virginia”. Train, the album, has other songs that are not “Meet Virginia” – and if they’re not bad enough for me to fire off five paragraphs of me losing my mind because they suck, there is also quite literally nothing interesting about a single one of them. I’m not even exaggerating here. I don’t know if I’m just floundering because Train leads off with the staggeringly stupid “Virginia” and then spends the duration of an LP basically doing a Weird Al style parody of the Allman Brothers, but that’s where we’re at. It sounds like a Black Crowes record mashed-up with a Counting Crows one; this band, at their inception, was essentially Training Crows, which would have been a hilarious conceit if they weren’t so po-faced and earnest about the whole thing. Monahan even sounds like he studied at the altar of Chris Robinson and Adam Duritz, boasting the former’s blurting white-guy-soul yawp and the latter’s tendency to burst into emotive wailing, while somehow never sounding truly passionate or authentic. (A shame that Monahan’s vocals have been forever tethered to Train, because he does, I admit, have some chops and a fairly impressive range, one that could border on the dazzling were he to knuckle down and create some non-terrible music one day.)

“Idaho” tries to go swamp-rock with lurching blues guitar. “Days” cleans up the guitars, keeps the rhythm, and adds a wheezing accordion, to utterly no avail. These tracks are back-to-back, in a true genius-stroke of sequencing. I assume “Free”, which boasts a very familiar-sounding ascending vocal in the chorus, has been used in an AT&T or Chevrolet commercial at some point, which is about all it’s useful for. Well, that, and picking out more kernels of Monahan’s baffling lyrical displays – the chorus reads “they call me free, but I call me a fool”, which is exceptionally awkward phrasing, and elsewhere he drops “slipped down to Mexico, started messin’ with her yellow afro” on us, which now makes me think that Pat Monahan may actually freestyle all his lyrical content on the spot. Have you ever heard a rapper who can’t freestyle do it anyway? It comes out like “yo, they call me Dave, I got a stave, I live in a cave, and I like to wave” – just a bunch of stuff that technically rhymes but for no reason. I refuse to believe Pat Monahan wrote the yellow afro line down, looked at it critically, and returned to it at a later date when it was time to record “Free” and said “yup, this sounds good here.”

Oh, and the less said about “Homesick” the better. Really, Train? We need a “life is better in a small town” screed from a band that hails from the dusty roadside town of SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA? “You wanna be where they still open doors for you”/”you wanna be where they still pump your gas for you” = “the big city’ll chew you up and spit you out” or some other such cliche. Matchbox 20 would later write “Bright Lights”, a 1000x better take on the subject; ditto Train’s “If You Leave” and Matchbox’s “If You’re Gone”, so if you’re keeping track, that’s at least twice Train have been trounced by MATCHBOX 20.

In conclusion, I am going to drive myself mad writing about Train. Train is, by all accounts, the band’s least-offensive record – a claim I’m inclined to believe, because outside of “Meet Virginia”, I had to really investigate to find more things to be mad about. Don’t get me wrong: you have no reason to listen to this album, ever. EVER. If you want ’90s pop-rock or Americana, you have LITERALLY THOUSANDS of other options at your disposal – God, pick up a Jayhawks record, will you? – and, as Train never succeeds at rising above the level of “there are some vaguely choogling guitars in the background here”, you shouldn’t ever go out of your way to listen to it. Here’s to my downward spiral.

TRAIN FANS ON YOUTUBE SAY:

“you can’t dethrone this group for me , they will forever be the best quality band to share their talent with us all xx” – Rachel Mcadam

“Looked at the song title too fast and thought it said Meet Vagina.” – Daymon Rondino

“lol imsoo durnk right now” – poopsmidgen

“At least once a month this album gets popped into my 1000 watt system and I bass out all the rap shit with some REAL tight drums and guitar!!! My honkey ass drives the black boys crazy when my shit hits harder than theirs!! :)” – licknadds

Album grade: D+
Album grade, adjusted for Train: B
Album grade, adjusted for “Meet Virginia”: F-