"The song "Life Is Not A Lesson" came about halfway through the writing process," Russin explained. "I borrowed the line from a recently-written-yet-unused lyric. It seemed like the sentiment in the song answered a lot of the questions that earlier songs had brought up, and the further along the album went it just felt right to title the album after this lyric and its solution. It summed up succinctly what I was trying to say all along: life is not a lesson to be learned."
Russin co-fronted Title Fight for many years before the band suspended operations and Ned became Glitterer. He initially self-released two EP's that were odd, charming, clever, eloquent, and highly proficient records, hand-made in the spartan bedroom-pop mode: some programmed drums and keyboards with an electric bass and a voice. The songs were about the trap of self-awareness and the impossible dream of self-negation; and despite their being, combined, all of about 18 minutes long, they left long-lasting impressions, stuck themselves in peoples' heads and stayed put.
Lyrically, many of the songs on Life Is Not A Lesson are short, dialectical considerations of the countless daily miniature panic attacks that attend the rigorously examined life. For example, the lyrics of the previously released track "Are You Sure" - "Feel it in my spine / Certainty is mine / Are you sure?" - combines the tension-building properties of GBV's "Hot Freaks" with the tension-resolving blast of something like The Pixies' "Gouge Away". Life is Not a Lesson proves to be a rigorous reckoning with the life of the mind at a time when there's not much life outside the mind.
The darkest and deadliest events in our history, like the manifold calamities of 2020, aren't pieces of an academic puzzle to be pondered from a safe remove. Tragedy is not "material"; it's life. Life is not a lesson; it's life. And life goes on. Knowing that, all we can do is heed the title track of Glitterer's new album (maybe the closest thing to an intellectual manifesto that we'll ever get from Ned Russin): "Think aloud / Inherit doubt / Build another bridge for them to burn / Run away / Speak slowly / Life is not a lesson to be learned."
