The Wikipedia page for the genre twee pop contains a nearly perfect etymology section, describing it as a word derived from the speech of babies. If you are at all familiar with twee pop, you know this is the most appropriate conclusion one could reach.

It is littered with boy/girl (distinctly different from man/woman) harmonies, twinkling synths, and a bouncing bass tone, all floating beneath the most infantile lyrics. What might be seen as simple instead summons an immediate and earnest sentimentality that anyone could be partial to. It is warm whole milk in the middle of the night, a pale yellow plush animal idling alone at a gas station off the I-5 South. To contest this, you would have to be a monster. The human predilection for twee pop feels almost prenatal.

Twee, in all its saccharine sweetness, is sneakily deceptive. It demands sentimentality from you without offering context. It sections itself in the memories of your sweetest moments, the mystery of how it ended up there being half of the fun.

A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness by Rocketship is a testament to this. The album cover bears only a painting of a barely legible couple, with nothing to grasp onto besides the small “rocketship” in the upper left corner. The record runs 33 minutes and 43 seconds and documents both the joy and the ruin of love. It is cute, admittedly, and then minutes later irreconcilably heartbreaking, moving from “I’m just waiting for my love so we can go away to a happy day” to “When the morning comes, we’ll sigh and avoid each other’s eyes and never wonder why we live lonely lives.”

The ambiguous and elusive lyrics, that really can be said by anyone, and applied to an array of situations in which they would still make complete sense, demand an active heartbreaking listening experience, and really the hurt, the deep pit in your stomach is from the ambiguity;  not knowing whats going on or why, can inherently be a lot scarier than the viable. Not having a face to point the record to, the complete erasure of artist to fan, creates almost a secular listening experience entirely. 

While not a strict genre-defining twee pop record, it captures the genre’s emotional center. Its droning synths and ambient passages push it toward some third category that feels too tedious to name.
The album demands sentimentality, empathy, longing, and grief without context. There is virtually no information about the record, or even the band, online. Its longevity feels like proof of concept: thirty years later, it remains intact and warm. 

How do you think that “twee” as a genre came to be?


Dusty Reske: I’m not too well-versed in the twee genre, but one can certainly hear the sound in pop music going far back. The Beach Boys, for example, seem super twee, whereas The Beatles, while also one of the big pop groups of the time, do not. The Rolling Stones are not twee, but The Monkees are. Twee pop for me has a degree of naivete, an “up” disposition, if you will, and sometimes an uncomplicated, romantic view of love and the world. Puppy dogs and sunshine, soda pop and a gee-whiz open-eyed, trusting wonder. It’s anti-Goth music, and un-death metal, an affirmative reaction keeping positivity alive in a decadent age on a dying planet.

What is the difference between 90s twee and this contemporary twee we have seen more of in recent years? 


Dusty Reske: I’m not really sure. I love pop music so end up digging some twee pop, but I’m not a follower of the scene, if there’s one. I can see that some of my songs can be classified as twee, but I guess I don’t consider Rocketship a twee band.

*(Editing: to each their own. But many others and I would consider this album the pinnacle of twee pop. Wikipedia would also like to add that it falls into ‘shoegazing’)

What do you think resonates with A Certain Smile a Certain Sadness? Has the album changed contextually for you? 


Dusty Reske: The record reminds me of the time period I recorded it, living in Sacramento, and the people I knew back then. It seems like just yesterday, but so much has changed in my life. The context is about the same, and when playing the songs I get to kind of relive the life I used to have back then. The songs are all about relationships, real and fictionalized, and I think about and feel those old feelings I used to have and share with others.

What is your personal favorite track off of A.C.S.A.C.S?


Dusty Reske: I love something about each song, but “We’re Both Alone” I like a lot because it seems the most unique and unlike my influences. Plus it has some cool rhythmic parts and strong melodies. It captures both the “smile” and the “sadness”.


What are you looking forward to the most with touring again?

Dusty Reske: What I look forward to most is meeting the people who like Rocketship. Mostly only making records all of these years, folks digging my tunes have been abstract and disembodied digital data points. Putting real people in front of me so we can all enjoy the music together will be amazing.


Are there plans for new music?

Dusty Reske: I have a new record Hurt Feelings coming out later this year on Darla, plus an EP and a double album not too soon after that.


To say sentimentality is missing from contemporary music would be dubious, and a flat lie. It is instead a transmuted sentimentality, one that now demands context.

I immediately think of The Marías, an indie pop band that has existed for nearly a decade but only recently reached broader success following the end of lead singer María Zardoya and drummer Josh Conway’s eight-year relationship. The breakup inevitably bled into their album. They discuss it openly on podcasts with a kind of practiced vulnerability, and fans developed a parasocial grief over the dissolution, applying that context back onto lyrics that otherwise might have remained ambiguous.

I also think of Karly Hartzman’s Vulture essay about her breakup with MJ Lenderman (formerly of Wednesday, now something like the poster child of neo-indie-country). After reading it, you can no longer hear Lenderman’s “She’s Leaving You” without picturing the details she describes: the mold in the shower, the stoveless ventilation kitchen situation, you can practically smell the metallic salmon they were cooking alongside the air of a dying relationship she so plainly laid out. 

The song becomes inseparable from her account. You are left with a deep, parasocial, and admittedly pointless empathy for both of them. All rendered vividly through details you or I are not necessarily entitled to. The only reason you or I possess that context is that someone was boldly vulnerable,and like anyone, you grew curious enough to assemble the emotional narrative so the album would “hit harder”. This is an arduous chore to give art; for it to require explicit emotional context, and emotional labor, albeit distanced, and removed labor. In this case, an album would require much more than instrumentation, cover art, a producer, etc. It takes on an entirely new medium, almost, which feels entirely unfair to ask for. 

It can also feel a bit cheap, frankly. The need to know can be quite useless,i n a metaphorical way but also in a practical way, I think of my time spent alongside Julie on their fall North American tour. I am an outsider to music, the process of making it, playing it, literally everything,  so when I saw kids reaching their iPhones over to snap a picture of guitarist Keyan Pourzand's pedal board, I had to ask what the point of it was. Pourzand said this was normal. The obvious assumption can be made that they want to recreate the guitar tone, but it felt more like “knowing to know”. 

Not to fault Hartzman, Lenderman, or the members of the Marias, but it raises a painfully contemporary sensation; that art has become more active (deragatory)  than it once required. It demands an obvious nature that feels sacrilegious to the notorious ambiguity of music, to the art of “the album”. In the age of information, does one require it, maybe even demand it for something to be meaningful? Do you have to know the bloody details to care? 

Ambiguity at one point was essential for art, the subjectivity being inherently what makes art so engaging forthe viewer/ listener, applying your anecdotal experiences, biases, to come to a secular understanding. It seems that there is a sensation now that emphasizes a mass understanding of art, the making of it, and its objective meaning. While I dont have an answer or understanding for what this implies culturally, the newfound need for context is glaringly pervasive and impossible to ignore at this point. 

At the risk of sounding like a hauntologist douchebag, music just isnt the same anymore. A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness lodges itself into a time and space where context isn't key, atmosphere, sentimentality (and not the simulacrum of it), mystery, and unsettled lyricism can remain yours. 

*Rocketship’s 30th anniversary issue of “A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness” is available for preorder, alongside tickets to their upcoming West Coast tour.