Cardinal Turns 10

Pinegrove felt like the future — like my future, like our future. It wasn't on the scale of the current Geese-mania, but a decade ago, a palpable excitement was building behind the Montclair, NJ group. Eventually, that momentum was derailed in a depressing, confusing fashion that complicated Pinegrove fandom for the remainder of their run. But at the time, I was smitten, and I believed they could become the greatest indie band of their generation.

That belief had everything to do with Cardinal, their second proper album, released 10 years ago today. Cardinal was an instant entry into my personal canon, sparking the kind of head-over-heels obsession that becomes more fleeting as you get older. Not many albums released in the 2010s meant more to me in real time. I don't think my attachment was unique — just ask all those people with Pinegrove tattoos they may or may not regret — and given that I was already in my thirties when the album dropped, I'm arguably not even part of the right micro-generation to truly claim this band as my own. But when revisiting Cardinal in recent weeks, I was stunned by my intense emotional reaction to the music. Renewed exposure to these songs cranked up my wistfulness to extremes. 

In some sense it's appropriate that Pinegrove had me in my feelings. Cardinal emerged near the end of the so-called emo revival, the "fourth wave" of emo bands that broke out in the early 2010s by trading out the arena-rock pomp of the MySpace-era "third wave" for the passion, grit, and math-rock virtuosity of the "second wave" in the '90s. Pinegrove's music didn't really fit into that movement, but they were signed to Run For Cover, one of the most important record labels of the emo revival, so I first understood them as a kind of emo band. And despite their countrified indie rock aesthetic and their lack of twinkly finger-tapped guitars, their music was nothing if not emotive.

Evan Stephens Hall, the singer and songwriter at the heart of the band, was a familiar Type Of Guy: sensitive, progressive, prone to conveying big feelings in grand poetic language. He was 26 upon Cardinal's release, which makes perfect sense. The album exists in the headspace of college and the wilderness years afterward, when you're still trying to figure out how to be grown up. Life speeds up, responsibilities accrue, and it becomes ever harder to stay connected with even the most important people in your life.

Hall's songs captured that restless young-adult yearning. There is a too-cleverness to some of his wordplay that can take me out of it when reading the lyrics sheet, but somehow it all works wonders when threaded into Pinegrove's soft-edged roots-rock — perhaps because too-cleverness is inherent to that stage in life, especially for a punk-house intellectual like Hall. He's often in motion on Cardinal: riding public transportation, flying to Japan, walking home in an emotional fog. "The album's a lot about place," Hall told SPIN. "A lot about traveling, but also a lot about Montclair. [I was] thinking about distance, space, and places I've been." Though he told VICE that returning home to Montclair after a short-lived move to Brooklyn allowed him ample time and space to write because all his friends had graduated and moved away, he lamented to DIY that year that being on the road so much was making it tough to maintain relationships, "which is the ore of writing."

Relationships were certainly at the center of Hall's own songs, to the extent that Cardinal is bracketed by tracks called "Old Friends" and "New Friends." The former is Pinegrove's masterpiece, an ambling anthem fueled by longing, regret, and a sentimentality that might strike some as saccharine but pierces me to the heart every time. A few self-consciously writerly flourishes ("my steps iterate my shame") can't undermine the powerful scene-setting. Hall alludes to personal tragedy via chance encounters in transit — "I saw Leah on the bus a few months ago/ I saw some old friends at her funeral" — evoking images of a young man moving through life consumed by melancholia. It builds to epiphanies that double as shout-along bars: "I got too caught up in my own shit/ That's how every outcome's such a comedown" is preceded by my personal favorite, "I should call my parents when I think of them/ I should tell my friends when I love them."

The band matches Hall's conversational grace, moving through simple chord changes with subtle virtuosity. Mike Levine, father of band members Zack and Nick Levine, contributes aching pedal steel to "Old Friends" among other tracks, and a current of banjo complements the steady guitar crunch at the song's core. (Hall's dad Doug, who has a cover band with the Levines' dad, is on the album too, playing piano on "Waveform.") Nandi Rose Plunkett's backing vocals bolster a chorus that stretches downcast self-obsession to the heavens. Every element comes together to summon a quarter-life listlessness so potent that it still sends me spiraling every time.

Cardinal keeps pulling off moments that approach the opening track's splendor. Pinegrove let 'er rip on the twangy rocker "Then Again," howl their lungs out amidst the churning glimmer of "Visiting," build slowly toward catharsis on "Cadmium" and "Size Of The Moon." All throughout, they prove to be not just a singer-songwriter vehicle for Hall but a proper unit, locked in and full of musical ideas. It's not an especially hi-fi record, but they paint the corners of the mix with so many gorgeous flourishes that a mere eight-song tracklist feels like a fully rendered universe. When the album finally circles back around to the brightly chiming "New Friends," with its promise of hopeful horizons, the bildungsroman has reached its completion. The future feels wide open.

In Cardinal's wake, I went all-in on Pinegrove. I spun the album constantly, tapping into a bleary romantic nostalgia for my own coming of age, marveling at the way certain bands can emerge out of nowhere and strike you like lightning. I went to see the band every chance I got: at SXSW, in my hometown, and at Pitchfork Music Festival, where they were greeted as rising stars and maybe even conquering heroes. I let myself consider the possibility they'd become a Wilco-like fixture, a generational touchstone. The following year, a new album, Skylight, hit my inbox months ahead of its scheduled release, and it lived up to my wildest expectations about what Pinegrove's Cardinal follow-up might entail. I'm grateful for the months I was able to enjoy it untainted by what happened next.

On Nov. 21, 2017, Hall posted a lengthy message to Facebook announcing that he had been accused of "sexual coercion" by an unnamed woman, that he had taken advantage of the power imbalance that comes from being a man fronting a famous rock band, that he was very sorry, that he was canceling the band's tour dates and going to therapy. It was a vague statement that raised more questions than it answered, and it left Pinegrove and their fans in limbo.

This was the Me Too era, when American society was publicly reckoning with entrenched, destructive patterns related to sexual abuse. Many of us were resolving to take claims of misconduct seriously and struggling with how to hold alleged perpetrators accountable. Plenty of people wrote Hall off as an abuser and washed their hands of the band immediately, a fair and reasonable response, especially at a time when the revelations about rotten behind-the-scenes behavior were piling up to a dispiriting extent. Some of us held our breath, wondering when more information would come out, hoping there had been some misunderstanding.

Details emerged in September 2018, almost a year after Hall's confession, via a deeply reported Pitchfork feature. In the story, a mediator summed up Hall's actions with his alleged victim like so: "She and Evan had a brief relationship, and she was in a relationship when it started. She felt that he coerced her into cheating on her partner with him, and she felt that she said no to him several times... and he continued to pursue her." Hall said the relationship progressed mutually but acknowledged her "right to describe her experience however feels true to her," concluding, "I definitely could have conducted myself better." It seemed like the kind of dispute that might have been handled privately, and maybe it would have been if not for Punk Talks.

The story revealed that Hall's statement was spurred on by a Philadelphia woman named Sheridan Allen, founder of an organization called Punk Talks, whose behavior led Hall and others to falsely believe she was a licensed therapist, though she said she never claimed to be one. Per quotes from an actual therapist sourced by Pitchfork, Allen seemingly overstepped her role by offering therapy while also participating in informal accountability processes. Her involvement seemed to worsen an already messy situation, something she acknowledged in the article. "I made egregious errors and mistakes throughout this situation," Allen wrote in an email interview. "I was acting without any guidance or a board and I have done absolutely everything I can now and in the future to ensure adequate checks and balances, as well as ensuring this will never happen again."

Ultimately, Hall and his alleged victim worked things out via a mediator. Believing he had put in the necessary restorative work, she gave Pinegrove her blessing to release Skylight and resume touring. They got the band back up and running, and they had a fairly successful career. After self-releasing Skylight because other Run For Cover artists were uncomfortable being associated with Pinegrove, the band signed to Rough Trade for two more albums. They toured extensively, playing many sold-out shows along the way. They were profiled in The New Yorker. They had a viral TikTok moment. They were influential, too, helping to set the stage for this decade’s wave of rootsy indie rock. When Hall put the band on hiatus and enrolled in grad school, Pinegrove was a successful operation.

Yet for some of us, weirdness persisted. Matty Healy even wrote it into a 1975 song. We all have to apply our own conscience to these matters. Personally, based on the available information, I don't think Hall's actions merited renouncing my fandom. But it was hard to revive my enthusiasm for Pinegrove after it all went down. A dark cloud hung over everything, raining on what had once seemed like a victory parade. It's possible Marigold and 11:11 were masterful works on par with Cardinal and Skylight, but I listened to them from an emotional remove. It just wasn't the same anymore.

I wish it was possible to revisit Cardinal without rehashing all of this, but it would be bizarre and irresponsible to leave it out. The scandal has become intrinsic to the Pinegrove story — a story that, somewhere on the path to triumph, became a cautionary tale. With a few more years of distance, I've found that I'm able to fully give myself over to those old songs again, to not just hear them but truly relish them. It's a joy and a relief to reengage with a song as personally meaningful as "Old Friends" and remember why I loved this band so much. But mixed in alongside that old elation, there are new layers of aching.