A More Perfect Union

Most rock albums ease you in. The Monitor opens with a dead president. Before a single guitar is struck on "A More Perfect Union," a crackly recording of Abraham Lincoln's Lyceum address plays, a speech about the dangers a republic faces from within.^[2] Then the band detonates, and for seven minutes a kid from New Jersey tries to work out whether his own misery and his country's sickness are the same problem.

That collision, between private despair and national mythology, is the engine of the song and the album it launches. It is loud, overstuffed, funny, and sincerely desperate, often in the same bar.

Where the song comes from

Titus Andronicus formed in Glen Rock, New Jersey, in 2005, and took its name from a Shakespeare play.^[3] Patrick Stickles, the band's singer and songwriter, has been casual about that choice, saying the name was just a name the band needed, with the deeper explanations invented later so he would have something to say when asked.^[4] He has also said he writes exclusively about himself.^[4] That matters for a record that looks, from the outside, like a history lesson.

The Monitor was recorded in August 2009 with producer Kevin McMahon and released on XL Recordings in March 2010.^[1] It is a loose concept album built around the American Civil War. The title comes from the USS Monitor, the first ironclad warship commissioned by the US Navy, and the closing track recounts its famous clash with the Confederate ship Virginia in 1862.^[1] The band even tied the release to the 148th anniversary of that battle.^[1]

"A More Perfect Union" is the opener and, at just over seven minutes, one of the longest tracks.^[1] It is listed as punk and indie rock, and it ends with a spoken passage drawn from William Lloyd Garrison's writing in the first issue of the abolitionist paper The Liberator, published in 1831.^[2] So the song is bookended by two voices from American history: one warning that the nation could destroy itself, the other refusing to compromise on slavery. Everything in between is a young man yelling.

The Civil War as a metaphor for a bad mood

It would be easy to read the album as a straight historical project, but that is not how it works. One contemporary reviewer described it as a loose concept record that uses the Civil War as a portentous metaphor for present-day American anger and division, with little narrative and a lot of borrowed speeches holding it together.^[5] The war is less a story being told than a lens being held up to a feeling.

The feeling, in this opening song, is that of being a young person in a small town who suspects that the place, and maybe the whole country, is rigged against him. The narrator moves through grievances both personal and civic, and the song keeps blurring the line between them. A broken relationship, a dead-end town, a sense of moral failure, and a country that has lost the thread of its own ideals all get the same furious treatment.

This is the central trick of the record. Stickles treats the nation as though it were a person with a case of the blues, and treats himself as though he were a nation in the middle of a civil war. The split in the title is both historical and psychological: the Union and the Confederacy, but also the part of you that wants to go on and the part that wants to give up.

Sin, guilt, and the weight of the past

There is also a religious undertone that colors the whole performance. Asked about the religious references in this song and others on the album, Stickles attributed them to a seriously Catholic upbringing that left him with a lasting sense of dread and guilt.^[4] That helps explain why the narrator's failures feel less like bad luck and more like a judgment.

Guilt gives the song its peculiar emotional shape. The early verses sound like confession, a list of what has gone wrong and whose fault it might be. But confession in rock music usually leads either to resignation or to redemption, and this song refuses to pick one. It turns the confession into a rallying cry, so that admitting how bad things are becomes the first act of defiance.

The Lincoln address at the start underlines the idea. In that speech, the young Lincoln argued that the gravest threat to the republic was not a foreign invader but a breakdown of respect for law and institutions at home. A song that begins that way is telling you that the enemy in question is internal, whether it is a country's or a person's.

Springsteen, Bragg, and the New Jersey inheritance

No discussion of this track can skip its debts. The song carries references to early Billy Bragg material and to the band's New Jersey roots, and it riffs on the work of Bruce Springsteen, another New Jersey native.^[1] A reviewer at the time noted that the album opens and closes with unsubtle Springsteen nods, and read the opener as part kill-your-idols punk and part real affection.^[5]

That double feeling is the key. Springsteen's songs about running away from a small town, about being a doomed romantic with nothing but a car and a dream, are the mythology Stickles grew up inside. The Monitor takes that mythology seriously enough to quote it, and honestly enough to ask whether it was ever true. The answer the song gives is complicated: the dream was a lie, and it also saved your life.

Bragg's influence points the other way, toward punk-folk earnestness and the idea that a political song can also be a love song. Together the two touchstones explain the tone of the track, which is bombastic and tender, historically ambitious and embarrassingly personal.

How the music tells the story

The sound does a lot of the thematic work. Production on the album is clearer and bigger than on the band's debut, something critics credited to a larger budget.^[5] The opener lets that scale show. It starts in a mood of grim stock-taking and builds, section by section, toward a second half that one critic called raging.^[2] The shift from mumbled disillusion to communal shouting is the song's argument in sonic form: despair, repeated loudly enough and by enough people, becomes something like solidarity.

The guest roster reinforces that reading. The album features members of bands including Ponytail, Wye Oak, Hallelujah the Hills, the Felice Brothers, Vivian Girls and the Hold Steady, and the historical voices on the record are played by friends: Craig Finn reads Walt Whitman, and Cassie Ramone voices Jefferson Davis.^[1] The whole thing feels like a community pageant staged in a basement, and the song's chorus invites the listener into the crowd.

Reception and the problem of ambition

Critics responded strongly, if not unanimously. The album holds a Metacritic score of 82, signalling universal acclaim, and Pitchfork gave it 8.7 and later placed it among the best albums of the decade so far.^[1] Not everyone was convinced. One review gave it a 6 out of 10, accusing it of overly obvious sloganeering and suggesting that the band was plainly aiming for the great American rock album and meant it as their masterpiece.^[5]

Both reactions make sense. The song wants to be huge. It reaches for presidents, abolitionists, and Springsteen in a single breath, and it risks looking silly. What saves it is the speed at which it admits its own absurdity. A narrator who is willing to be a mess in front of Lincoln is harder to dismiss than one who poses as a prophet.

Other ways to hear it

One reading treats the song as straightforwardly political, a protest against the state of the country in the late 2000s, when the economy was collapsing and public anger was rising. On that view the Civil War framing is a way of saying that Americans were once again fundamentally divided, and nobody was talking honestly about it.

Another reading is almost entirely psychological. If Stickles writes only about himself, as he insists, then the nation in the song is a stand-in for the narrator's inner life, and the Union he wants to perfect is his own sanity. This version of the song is a depression narrative dressed in a Union Army uniform.

A third reading, probably the most generous, holds that the two meanings are inseparable. The point is that a person's mental weather and a country's moral weather influence each other, and that taking either seriously means taking both seriously.

Why it still lands

What makes "A More Perfect Union" last is that it never settles for irony. It is a song full of references, but it does not hide behind them. The grandeur of its subject matter is matched by an honest, almost embarrassing need to be heard.

Many listeners know the feeling the song captures: wanting to belong to something large and good, while suspecting that the institutions you inherited, whether a town, a church, a country, or a family, have failed you. The song says that this suspicion is no reason to quit. It is a reason to keep shouting, in the hope that someone else is shouting back.

That is why a record about a nineteenth-century war could sound so current to its first audiences, and why the opening track still works as a doorway. It begins with a warning from the past and ends with a call to action, and in between it makes a case that despair and hope are neighbors. The union to be perfected, by the end, is not just the country. It is the self, the crowd, and the stubborn possibility that the two can be joined.