Time Capsule: Paul Westerberg, Eventually

It had to happen. Paul Westerberg—son of no one, our bastard of young—had to grow up.

As frontman for the Replacements, Westerberg achieved sainthood in the eyes of the disaffected, the sloppy and the secretly (or not-so-secretly) sensitive, navigating the throes of young adulthood, from unrequited love to premature ennui, with utmost sensitivity and unexpected grace. Yes, tear-jerkers like “Answering Machine” and “Unsatisfied” sit on the same shelf as the likes of “Tommy Got His Tonsils Out” and “Gary’s Got a Boner”—tracks about as far removed from grace as you could get. But the Replacements’ impish outbursts were on one side of the same coin as their sophisticated power-pop anthems and lovesick ballads—only together do they tell the whole story of being young, drunk and already sick of it all. The ’Mats were inconsistent, but always real—they were indeed, a band that could be your life.

If you’ve been blessed with the comfort of stumbling upon yourself within the Replacements’ discography, you rank among a lucky few, relatively speaking—their music surely hasn’t faded into obscurity, but they never quite “made it.” That could be chalked up to a number of factors; some, like an arguable case of “ahead of their time” syndrome, were outside of their control. Others weren’t—if the ’Mats are best remembered for anything than their music, it’s for their self-destructiveness. Keep in mind: Westerberg (accompanied by bandmates Bob Stinson, Tommy Stinson and Chris Mars) would show up hammered to the band’s potential big-break set on Saturday Night Live in 1986, plow through generational opus “Bastards of Young” (minus a few forgotten lyrics), let a “C’mon, fucker!” loose, and end up banned from the show.

When not explicitly posited, a gigantic three-word question looms over almost every retrospective reprisal of the band’s work: What could’ve been? Had the band gotten it together, what-could’ve-been could’ve been something huge. Then again, maybe not: Part of why the Replacements remain so beloved (in certain circles) is because Paul Westerberg made it sound okay to stumble over words, get drunk on uneventful weeknights and occasionally indulge in some downright silliness. In this sense, the Replacements’ volatility can be oddly comforting, and I imagine it must have also been thrilling as it unfolded, not knowing if you were in for the best show of your life or a booze-soaked shit-show.

Sustainable, however, it was not. Asked by journalist Alan Paul in a 1996 interview if the band’s affinity for drinking contributed to their downfall, Westerberg responded affirmatively. “We drank to give us courage and once we had courage we did zany things to make people remember us,” he recalled. “And once they remembered us we started to write good songs and play better, but it always seemed to be overshadowed by the zany things we did. We just couldn’t up the ante that last time. We didn’t know where to take it because we had created this albatross. That’s why the band broke up—there was nothing left to do.”

The band’s self-combustion, made official in 1991, was inevitable, and so was Paul Westerberg’s “going it alone,” to quote his first single as a solo artist, 1992’s “Waiting for Somebody.” By this point, ramshackle recordings about boners and tonsillectomies were relics of the past. Now, Westerberg was singing punchy, polished and unabashedly pure pop songs (“Dyslexic Heart,” his second single, comes complete with some classic “Na nanana, na nanana na”-ing). Featured on the stacked Singles soundtrack, “Waiting for Somebody” and “Dyslexic Heart” might have lacked the rough-hewn charm of Westerberg’s earlier works, but the songs are solid and a natural progression for him, who’d been honing a cleaner, pop-skewed sound on the last few Replacements releases. It looked like prime time to introduce Westerberg, newly sober and back on his feet after the break-ups of his band and first marriage, as the songwriting powerhouse he was to everyone who didn’t already know it.

But Westerberg never really took off as a solo artist, either. Like his Replacements output, his singer-songwriter ballads and ruggedly handsome garage rockers weren’t quite in vogue for their era. At the head of the ’90s, grunge bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden were rising from the Seattle underground to national airwaves, taking off like the Replacements maybe could’ve (and definitely should’ve) just a handful of years earlier; by the decade’s close, a crop of accessible acts like the Goo Goo Dolls had their turn in the spotlight, bringing watered-down Westerberg to the Top 100. Westerberg’s three solo albums released in the ’90s were more or less buried beneath whatever was “in” for alternative-rock—an immense shame, because they house some of his finest compositions. Just within his debut solo record, 14 Songs, are two of the greatest and sincerest love songs of all time (“First Glimmer,” “Runaway Wind”), a lovely foray into the lo-fi territory he’d make a critical comeback forging on 2002’s home-recorded Stereo (“Black Eyed Susan”), and one of the most spine-tingling, euphoric bridges of any song, ever (on “Dice Behind Your Shades”).

To be fair, 14 Songs could’ve done without a few (ahem, “Silver Naked Ladies”), and its latter half suffers from uneven track sequencing. Westerberg acknowledged his debut’s flaws, shrugging it off as “just a collection of tunes” in conversation with Matt Pinfield on 120 Minutes. “I really wanted this one,” he said of its then-freshly-minted follow-up, Eventually, “to be an album. Like we used to have.” It took him two producers and three years of intermittent writing and recording to cobble together the record, and his efforts resulted in the strongest release of his ’90s triad. Yet, while notably more cohesive than its predecessor, it was met with a similarly tepid response, with its harder tracks particularly dismissed. “When Westerberg rocks out,” Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote for AllMusic, “he sounds tired and mannered.” Parry Gettelman opens his review for the Orlando Sentinel with some particularly scathing inquiries, before damning the album as a hunk of “soft-rock drivel”: “Did aliens steal Paul Westerberg’s brain?” he asked, “Or is the mysterious Smoking Man behind an evil government conspiracy to inject great songwriters with a deadly virus that instantly turns them into tired hacks?”

While criticisms leveraged at Eventually were grossly blown out of proportion, they weren’t entirely unfounded. It isn’t a boundary-pushing record; even Westerberg admitted that some of its songs tended towards predictability: “I’ve written that same song about 15 times now,” he admitted to Alan Paul of “You’ve Had It With You.” The album’s edges are occasionally over-buffed, and there’s no denying that it flirts with the mainstream, for better or worse—if the “Dyslexic Heart” babble rubbed you the wrong way, fair warning: There’s a generous handful of “ooh-ooh-oohs” and “yeah-yeah-yeahs” sprinkled throughout here for good measure. With a musical color palette as warm and muted as the cover image, it’s far from Westerberg’s most immediate work—it feels like opening the blinds at 2:00 p.m. on a Sunday, sunlight stinking into the bed you’ve been wasting away in and pouring into half-open eyes. You would be forgiven for giving Eventually a cursory listen and proceeding to relegate most of it to your brain’s musical backstock.

But, as its title suggests, it’s a record worth being patient with—one worth returning to days, months, years after first listening. I like David Fricke’s assessment for Rolling Stone: “What Eventually lacks in the snort and crunch of adolescence,” he wrote, “it makes up for with a subtler sting.” His review recalls one of the album’s final lines, an unintentional thesis: “It don’t ache, but baby, it’s gonna.” Eventually is a record of days that blur from one to the next, weekends that turn up as blank slates, quiet collapses without catharsis. Westerberg wastes no time in setting the tone with opener “These Are the Days,” extracting the song’s titular phrase from the sticky nostalgia that generally coats it—these days that he chronicles are nothing to write home about, nothing to snapshot and stick into photo albums to show to grandkids decades down the line. They’re isolated and painfully dull, more akin to the feeling of a faintly throbbing migraine than that of getting your heart (or tonsils) ripped out—they don’t hurt as much as they ache.

It’s almost comical that so many appraisals of Eventually heralded Paul Westerberg’s descent into tired old manhood (he was 36 at the time of its release), for on the record, his awareness of time’s passage borders on obsessive: Nearly half of the album’s tracks’ titles reference time metrics (“day[s],” “century,” “weekend,” “time,” “tomorrow”), in addition to its very name. Furthermore, his audience’s perception of his second act is among his focal concerns (although it’s often hard to tell whether he’s wryly flipping off his naysayers or internalizing the dread that all his good songs really had been wrung out). He imagines performing to an audience solely composed of custodians (“Century”), fears running out of time (“These Are the Days”), even professes to “fading faster than a U.K. pop star” (“You’ve Had It With You”).

As Westerberg tackles these feelings, he can be snippy, bitter and bruised—but that’s always been when he’s at his best, because it’s all the more affecting once he lets his bleeding heart rupture through whatever steely, punkish front he’s put on. He’d long mastered the art of the volta (a shift in thought or argument characteristic of most sonnets); a fine example is the turn-around of Pleased to Meet Me’s down-bad anthem “Valentine”: “If tonight belongs to you, tomorrow’s mine!” On Eventually, there’s the tiny but mighty addendum to the titular/chorus brag of “Ain’t Got Me”: “You ain’t got me—YET!” With the shriek of that one word, his illusory triumph over a former lover is pulled right out from underneath himself, as are the fried riffs he’d been chugging along; they give way to a fiddle that meanders as though it’s drunkenly attempting to walk a straight line. The finale of “You’ve Had It With You” similarly sees Westerberg’s sharp-tongued tirades deflate into a dejected cry: “You’ve had it with you—and you’ve had it with me, too!” he spits, his voice spiraling out as the muscular riffage melts to his feet. As on other tracks, the music seems to be fighting itself, and so is Westerberg: His petulant diatribes sound strained and blown-out, like he’s trudging, rather than pummeling, through the claustrophobic onslaughts of overdriven guitars. It’s a marriage of form and content that, if not immediately resonant, is identifiable when you find yourself feeling a little less needed than before. If Westerberg sounds worn-down, it’s for good reason.

When Paul Westerberg reflects on the past, his memories are more vinegary than sweet; on the survivor’s side of nights doing heroin in women’s bathrooms, he isn’t relieved or embarrassed, just jaded. When he snarls “so long to the so-so years” on “Century,” the words come out sideways, hanging with apathy, and you can hear him grind his teeth together as the dry, crunchy guitar lines dart past—it’s like he’s trying to fight against them, if only because he’s used to having to fight. The thing is, it’s harder to feel more alive than when you have to scratch and claw to be—there’s a fine line, and maybe even some overlap, between restoration and emptiness. When the pendulum settles into a stasis after swinging between extremes—when you’ve grown up, sobered up, crawled out from any ashes—it doesn’t always feel as invigorating as expected.

Eventually’s gnarlier tracks are stronger than they receive credit for; reaching through the washed-out production, one can trace the contours of their guts—they’re hollowed and hungry, pockets of melancholy. Still, it’s when Westerberg stops pushing against the music that the magic really happens. Flute notes spiral like black birds against a gaping, dusky sky on “Hide ’N’ Seekin,’” a cavern of a song one would tumble into, missing a step on the staircase down the way, whose sparseness is eerily entrancing in juxtaposition to the dense, beleaguered instrumentation of other tracks. There’s a sting to the sweetness of “MamaDaddyDid,” a tender jangle-pop confessional stringing childhood abandonment to an adult fear of commitment. Westerberg’s proclamation to live without regrets is no small feat, considering his infamous tracklist of regrettable behavior, but it isn’t as bad-ass or liberating as it reads on paper: It’s a massive, lonely tradeoff for love, merely “as good as it gets,” Westerberg hisses.

Despite the album’s lack of critical commercial success, it spawned one of Westerberg’s biggest hits in the wistful ballad “Love Untold.” Singing a misty-eyed elegy for a ne’er-to-be paramour (wearing a suit and tie in a corny music video, to boot) would be a woeful fate for most punks to endure—but Westerberg wasn’t, and never had been, just any punk: His craftsmanship as a pop composer is unparalleled, and expecting him to rail against his whip-smart musical instincts would be foolish. The dirge is a touch syrupy, but it’s rough in all the right places, too—the heart-wrenching cracks in Westerberg’s voice gingerly offset the clean production, keeping things from feeling too saccharine. Carefully nurtured by Westerberg’s distinctive empathy, intelligence and innate melodic sensibility, “Love Untold” is an undeniable highlight, as well as what seems an exercise in the world-building Westerberg had set out to accomplish on Eventually, an album largely preoccupied with foiled possibilities. This isn’t the triumphant “tomorrow” Westerberg had in mind when he exclaimed “If tonight belongs to you, tomorrow’s mine!”—that’s just another “eventually” that may or may not be on its way.

Eventually fleshes out a loneliness so deeply ingrained that it almost doesn’t register anymore— so familiar, in fact, that it’s personified as a character of its own: “These are the days no one sees / We run together for company,” Westerberg sighs, tucking the bitingly clever witticism into a soundscape as dimly-lit as his spirit. Throughout Eventually, he lifts the curtain on these lonesome, indistinguishable days, sketching out the banal details one would only notice if they had nothing better to do. You get the sense that he wrote songs as he paced around the house, every floorboard creaking and lamp buzzing into an enveloping silence. Take the mise en scène of “Once Around the Weekend,” a delicate, folksy soliloquy whose text resembles a pitifully unremarkable diary entry: “I watch myself fall apart / I watch rabbits in my yard / There goes another ’round the bend / I gotta sweep this floor again.” It’s a humdrum series of events, but it ranks among Westerberg’s most gut-wrenching lyrics. Because falling apart doesn’t always look like kneeling to the altar of a vomit-crusted toilet bowl—sometimes, it’s an unspoken realization that your weekend entertainment is just outside your window, your grounding achieved through mindless chores. Live out enough of these weekends, and you start to understand why a person can work up a mean, mean thirst after a hard day of nothin’ much at all.

Last chances and lost chances overcast the everyday on Eventually—those rabbits in the yard, the floorboards that need cleaning—but, as in his Replacements heyday, Westerberg manages to scavenge some cheap thrills from the rubble of mundanity. If “Once Around the Weekend” is his soapbox speech to backyard critters, its follow-up, “Trumpet Clip,” is his attempt to crack himself up as he sweeps away. A raucous hodgepodge of random thoughts and nonsensical inside jokes (“Let’s pin the tail on Demi Moore” is a standout), it doesn’t even feature trumpets, judging listed personnel—Westerberg manned the sax, and none other than Tommy Stinson took over trombone duties. Discussing the song with Pinfield, Westerberg recalled, “That’s what was fun with the Replacements, when we used to just play instruments we didn’t know how to play and play songs we didn’t know how.” “Trumpet Clip” is overtly ridiculous and facetious, but the fun that went into it is palpable and contagious, and its on-the-fly essence is not unwelcome on an album that can verge on being too comfortable with formulaic structures and anesthetically warm textures.

Eventually ends with radiant bursts of renewal and relief. The penultimate torch song “Good Day,” a tribute to the late Bob Stinson, sanctifies each day as a miracle in its own right: “A good day is any day that you’re alive,” Westerberg repeats in a breathy near-whisper, a blanket of keys and strings draping around his mantra like it were a precious jewel. The song is a little clunky, but endearingly so—you feel the emotions hit Westerberg as he pounds away at the piano, delivering a howl of a final sendoff to Stinson on the bridge.

While “Good Day” is a reminder that there’s nothing like death to make you savor the slower days, album closer “Time Flies Tomorrow” is one that there’s nothing like love to make time speed by—“but it ain’t made a move yet,” Westerberg grins, preserving the features before his eyes as everlasting pieces of poetry (“eyes like two hubcaps,” “your hands are like an ovation, an uncertain work of art”). Like cleansing teardrops rushing toward a deep catharsis, twinkling piano notes seep between each word, and the crisp strumming blushes with the first light of dawn. It sounds like a rebirth, and it is: Life only begins when you decide to start living, a practice wholly distinct from existing.

Just before this rebirth, towards the end of “Good Day,” Westerberg pauses: “Hold my life one last time.” The first time he begged for his life to be put on-pause was nearly a decade prior to Eventually, during an infinitely more reckless and ruthless period. The album charts a different mode of life: that of a “well-adjusted adult,” as Westerberg described himself to Paul. The days of a well-adjusted adult might pale in glory to the quasi-theatrical miseries a restless should-be rockstar weathers—the shards of broken glass have been swept up, the stained flannels traded for starched suit jackets—but in Westerberg’s sensitive hands, they’re treated as equally potent, sometimes devastating, material. They can feel just as unreal: On “Century,” when Westerberg shirks flipping the calendar’s pages, it’s less a matter of forgetfulness than an allegorical denial of all the unannotated squares being actual episodes of life. But, as Westerberg realizes by the album’s finale, life can only be put on hold for so long, no matter how you’re living it—imagine all that you’ll miss if you wait too long for some vague “eventually” to whack you on the head. Besides, there are only two certainties one can forecast for tomorrow: that it will fly by, and that a raspy-voiced Minnesotan bard has most likely lived it out already. And luckily for us, he’s probably written a damn good song or two about it.

Read: “The Replacements Stop Caring and Start Growing Up: Let It Be at 40″

Anna Pichler is one of Paste’s music interns. When she’s not writing about music, she’s working towards an undergraduate degree in English Literature from The Ohio State University. You can find her on X @_Anna_pichler_ and Bluesky @annapichler.bsky.social, where she mainly shares her work and reposts her favorite Bob Dylan memes.