I understand if you died from Lumineers Fatigue sometime during the winter of 2012-13 and want to give this one a pass. It's easy to get tired of good-looking and earnest white people in porkpie hats and button-down shirts.
I guess I love this song because I didn't get tired of The Lumineers in 2012, possibly because I could distinguish them from Mumford and Sons (a group whose original music I haven't really cared much for since "Little Lion Man" but--with performances of The National's "England" and Bruce Springsteen's "I'm On Fire"--would probably be my favorite band in the world if they were strictly a cover band).
I've had a complicated relationship with folk rock and country--I'm descended from a long line of Appalachian yeoman farmers, but I was raised in New Jersey, where I wasn't really exposed to anything Southern or rural--the only country I got was the most broadly appealing Toby Keithish stuff, which I didn't like because while I'm a Piney, but I'm not a "Spending the weekend playing paintball and going mudding in my Toyota Camry" level of Piney. And I didn't get much of a folk or bluegrass influence from my relatives either, because those of them who lived in the Shenandoah Valley tended to be devout Mennonites, and while music was huge part of their lives, they felt more at home in the hymnal than with Pete Seeger or something like "Rocky Top."
So I grew up, like most white suburban Northeastern kids, listening to everything but country.
That changed a little when I went to college in South Carolina, and got into Bright Eyes and Johnny Cash for a while, but I really discovered alt-country and bluegrass when I was nearing the end of grad school. And The Lumineers pushed me over the edge into a sea of folk rock and bluegrass that included Nickel Creek, Trampled By Turtles and the best Spotify playlist ever.
"Stubborn Love" sticks out because it feels epic and rambling, but is in reality quite compact--there's a verse, a prechorus and a chorus, just put together to form a song the way you can build a house out of the same three Lego bricks if you have enough of them. The song is fairly similar in content to Billy Joel's "She's Always A Woman."
Most affecting is the second verse, which starts out with "It's better to feel pain / than nothing at all / the opposite of love's indifference," which is a corny line that I'm not sure I agree with.
But then it gets into some real "Thunder Road"-level shit (and one side effect of this project is realizing how much of the music I like is, if not directly Springsteen-influenced, then somewhere along the post-Springsteenian evolutionary chain) with "So pay attention now / I'm standing on your porch screaming out / And I won't leave until you come downstairs."
Just the way that last line's composed and set up and left to hang made it perfect for the state I was in when this album was most popular--in mid-to-late 2012, when I was between grad school and my first job out of grad school. I was constantly bored and alone, with no certainty about my future, and too broke to go do anything but sit at home and think about how I'd fucked up my life without really doing anything wrong, and be terrified that there was nothing I could do to fix it. Probably 10 or 15 of the 100 songs I'm writing about got a lot of playtime during that year, and one of the major decisions I'm still trying to make is how much I want to write about the personal context of those songs as they come up.
Anyway, that's made the desperation of "Stubborn Love" stick with me. And I never got sick of it because it never stopped being something I could identify with.
