Certain Songs #1426: Parquet Courts – “Stoned and Starving” | Medialoper

Album: Light Up Gold
Year: 2013

One of the best American indie bands of this decade, Parquet Courts manage to combine the off-kilter two-guitar attack of Pavement, the “anything can be a song” aesthetic of Guided by Voices and the drive of the early Dream Syndicate into something new, original, and a helluva lot of fun.

After an initial cassette-only release in 2011, they made a big splash in certain circles — circles where the aforementioned names were big — with Light Up Gold, a record where nearly all of the songs were under three minutes long and ended just where they needed to.

Naturally, the exception was the greatest song: “Stoned and Starving,” which is over five minutes long, despite having essentially a single verse repeated over and over, occasionally with slightly different lyrics, but always the same ending no matter how many different ways Andrew Savage chants it.

I was walking through Ridgewood, Queens
I was flipping through magazines
I was so
(Stoned and starving)
So stoned and starving

Well, I was reading ingredients
Asking myself “should I eat this?”
I was so
(Stoned and starving)
So stoned and starving

Anchored by a repeating riff and punctuated by noisy, discordant guitar solos by Savage and Austin Brown, “Stoned and Starving” really does conjure up the image of someone who is high AF but can’t seem to focus enough in order to at least get unstarving. So instead, he’s wandering around aimlessly.

Live, they up the tempo and turn it into an even longer jam, with drummer Max Savage pushing both guitarists onward and upward until they all just explode in a ball of light.

Fan-Made video for “Stoned and Starving”

“Stoned and Starving” live at KEXP, 2013

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