“Because I was treated for clinical depression last year,” Dulli said, going on to explain how he now needed to leave behind certain songs like “My Enemy” and “Be Sweet.” “The emotions those songs conjure up aren’t worth my mental well-being.”ĭulli’s answer was straightforward and believable, but what did it say about all the dependent fans out there? These records were more than fuel for psychogenic fire. ![]() So why did the Afghan Whigs significantly lighten up after Black Love ? Was it because their 1996 opus had dug deep and finally expunged all of the demons of guilt and ghosts of dead relationships? “Why is this record less bleak lyrically?” Rolling Stone asked frontman Greg Dulli about 1965 at the end of 1998. Sometimes weaning off of them was complicated, the dynamic not a far cry from a crucial line in Gentlemen ’s “When We Two Parted”: “If I inflict the pain/Then baby only I can comfort you.” Gentlemen and Black Love burrowed into minds racked with romantic angst and made extreme passions relatable and hummable. The feelings that the songs of their mid-’90s heyday spoke to when you needed them the most are often not the kind of feelings that you want to voluntarily visit again. The Afghan Whigs’ back catalog can be a precarious place to return to for this reason. If they were just listening to 1965, they were through it and doing all right. If Black Love was on the stereo, they were broken down but ready to be built back up again. If Gentlemen was the soundtrack that meant they were seething with self-recrimination. ![]() If the person was playing Congregation then they must be freshly wounded and inconsolably angry (see “Conjure Me”). ![]() Twenty-or-so years ago, a friend of mine had the idea that you could determine which stage of a bad break-up someone was in by which Afghan Whigs album they bumping.
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