Haley Bonar is only in her early 30s, yet to hear her tell it on Impossible Dream, you’d think her best days are long behind her. She sings about herself—or her surrogate selves in her songs, not that she makes much of a distinction—as if she’s washed up and permanently faded. On the record’s stickiest line, she manages to take a two-fer dig at both her past and present selves: “I was impossible when I was beautiful.” It’s familiar territory for the Minnesota songwriter, whose lyrics often read like tragi-comic bumper-sticker slogans. “I wish I could date my former self,” she quipped on her last record, 2014’s Last War, “She’d be a fun girlfriend.”
That record was a reinvention of sorts, even if it’s unlikely that an artist as down-to-earth as Bonar would use a term as pretentious as “reinvention.” After several albums of personable if not always especially distinguished indie folk, Last War dialed up the tempos and the volume and set fire to whatever lingering idealism she’d been clinging to. Impossible Dream is a true sequel, another brisk half-hour of barbed power-pop tunes that sting so sweetly that it’s only after the fact you consider you might need a tetanus shot.
There’s some irony in the album title, in that the dreams Bonar details really aren’t all that impossible: a family, a satisfying career, the respect of those close to her, a general sense of stability. But Bonar is mostly preoccupied with the forces that prevent us from realizing those dreams, be they the burden of outside expectations, the passage of time, and, in particular, the long shadow that our upbringings cast over us. “Hometown” opens the record with a failed attempt to escape that shadow, with an image of Bonar fleeing her small town, watching it burn as it shrinks in her rearview mirror. It should be a moment of triumph, but, she sings, “The further that I get, the deeper my regrets/Hometown goes wherever you go.” A song later, as everything goes to shit, she can’t escape a nagging thought: “Your mom was right/She’s always right.”
In spite of her fatalistic world view, Bonar largely keeps things light, singing over catchy new wave accompaniments in a punky Gwen Stefani pout. The record turns somber, though, when Bonar questions her own career path. For years each Bonar album came packaged with the same origin story: After being discovered by Low’s Alan Sparhawk, she impulsively dropped out of college to join the band on tour, and has dedicated her life to music ever since. Sure, it was just the guy from Low, and no, she didn’t go on to become Taylor Swift or anything, but there’s still a real element of fantasy in that story—every artist dreams of being discovered, and Bonar was.
It truly stings, then, to hear her poke holes in her own modest fairy tale. “Jealous Girls” is ostensibly about a woman rendered miserable by her own trust issues, yet its sympathies lie more with her philandering partner, a troubadour stuck touring through grim bars in unglamorous towns, presumably not unlike the one Bonar herself left behind. Who could blame an unfilled artist for finding reassurance in the company of women on the road? After all, Bonar sings, “They’re reminding you that you’ve still got youth.”
And that’s what Bonar’s songs always come down to: youth, that most fleeting of resources. The desire to make up for lost time is the driving force behind her songs, and it may also explain her own rock ’n’ roll makeover, which not coincidentally began around the time she became a parent. She also moonlights with a no-stakes dance-punk band on the side, Gramma’s Boyfriend, where she hits the same themes (“I live my broken dreams,” she sang on that group’s last release). From a less self-aware songwriter, these songs could scan as sour grapes, the grumblings of an artist bitter she never quite achieved the success and recognition that her early press seemed to promise was in reach, but they're filled with so much mischief and humor that they never feel truly bitter. For an album about things that haven’t worked out as she hoped, Impossible Dream finds her in mighty good spirits.
