I’ve written about a Dinosaur Jr. song once before. Years ago. That was for ‘Feel the Pain’. I want to say that was the first one by the band that I’d heard ever. And today’s number, ‘Start Choppin’, was the second. Both I found in almost identical circumstances. Sat on my behind in front of the television watching MTV2. Couldn’t remember what year exactly ‘Start Choppin’ was laid upon eyes exactly. I do recall feeling, again, very much like ‘Feel the Pain’, like I had heard the song before in an advert or something. The guitar trill J Mascis pulls off behind the falsetto “goodbye”s sounded very, very familiar. But if that wasn’t the case and my mind was just playing tricks on me, here was another song by that Dinosaur Jr. band that sounded just as good the last one to the young kid I was back then.

What I think the song details is a narrator’s frustration with a relationship they’re involved in that’s clearly on its last legs. Mascis dryly sings about feeling “so numb” that he “can’t even react”, wishing the other person would let things go and wondering if they’re listening to a word he’s saying. And yet, despite the dissatisfaction, the narrator is still too attached and isn’t ready to walk out – probably worried at the thought of being alone. There’s a definite tension threaded within the lyrics, between the two people in this relationship and I guess in the mental conversation the narrator’s having with themselves. And what better way to symbolise it than with not one but two blazing guitar solos? All distorted and wailing, they’re massive in sound among the crunching rhythm parts. Really aid in capturing the anguish. The music video fades the second solo out much earlier. Even I remember my young self thinking, “That solo definitely goes on longer on the actual CD.” And it does, I might even embed the whole thing at the end, just for the hell it.

‘…Choppin’ is the second song on the band’s 1993 album Where You Been. What I’ve always thought cool about that album is how most of the song titles on there can be used as an answer or addendum to the question posed by the album. Like, “Where you been?” “Oh, out there.” Or here, “Where you been? Start choppin’!” Like you’re being told to start preparing food or something. The song only has its name because the version of the album is made by splices of different takes of the track pasted together, to which songwriter J Mascis remarked the song title while all this was going on. The title appears nowhere in the lyrics, but I couldn’t imagine it being named anything else. It was released as the album’s second single, after ‘Get Me’ was released as the first. And that’s a great tune too. I only heard it for the first time in 2018, so it can’t get a post here. But if it could have, it would have.