Certain Songs #535: Grant Hart – “2541”

Album: 2541 EP
Year: 1988

The breakup of Hüsker Dü in early 1988 caught me by surprise and broke my heart. After all, they’d released more great music in the previous few years than any other band, and were only getting better.

Out of all of the bands I loved, surely they were going to last forever. Or at least long enough for me to finally get to see them in concert. Which hadn’t happened yet, for two reasons: 1) they never made it to Fresno, and 2) they weren’t quite popular enough with my peer group to gather folks for a road trip like we did for The Smiths or R.E.M. or U2.

So I never saw them, and I’ll never quite get over that. Luckily, both Bob Mould and Grant Hart have continued to make great music in the decades since, starting with Grant Hart’s amazing “2541,” a song that is an equal to any of the songs he did while in the Hüskers.

Over a quietly-picked acoustic guitar, Hart sings wistfully of the beginning of a chapter in his life:

Jimmy gave me the number
Jerry gave us a place to stay
And Billy got a hold of a van
And man we moved in the very next day

To twenty-five forty-one
Big windows to let in the sun
Twenty-five forty-one

As the drums build and the acoustic guitars get layered and augmented with electric guitars, Hart comes up with one of the greatest details about living in bohemian squalor I’ve ever heard.

We had to keep the stove on all night long
So the mice wouldn’t freeze

That’s just so exquisitely beautiful, which is why “2541” takes a turn when Hart starts letting us know that he’s singing not about the excitement of a new beginning from the standpoint of that new beginning, but rather from the perspective of that new beginning’s ending.

Now everything is over
Now everything is done
Everything’s in boxes
At twenty-five forty-one

Well things are so much different now
I’d say the situation’s reversed
And it’ll probably not be the last time
I’ll have to be out by the first

All along, the music has been swelling up and fading out, but after this it’s all build, as not just the guitars pile on, but Hart and his background singers just start repeating the utterly gorgeous chorus over and over and over.

Twenty-five forty-one
Big windows to let in the sun
Twenty-five forty-one
Big windows to let in the sun
Twenty-five forty-one
Big windows to let in the sun
Twenty-five forty-one
Big windows to let in the sun

On and on and on and on and on, in every possible combination, with Hart getting ever more emotional as the songuntil the guitars and drums swelled so loudly they drowned even the vocals out, carrying them into the fade.

As the first shot fired in what I assumed was going to be the long-running post-breakup war of one of my all-time favorite bands, “2541” utterly and absolutely floored me.

Even if the song wasn’t explicitly about the breakup of Hüsker Dü, it was about a break up, and it felt to me like Grant Hart had taken all of the sadness I felt about their breakups and all of the love I still felt about their music and channeled it into a single emotionally wrenching yet ultimately cathartic song.

Why this song isn’t remembered as one of the best indie rock singles of the 1980s is still beyond me.

Hart rerecorded this for his first solo album, Intolerance, which came out a year later. Revved up with big electric guitars from the very start, and sporting a conventional rhythm guitar throughout, it retains that amazing chorus, but doesn’t nearly have the same amount of soul.

So if that’s the only version you’ve ever heard — which given the fact that in 1988-1989 if you were in for a penny you were in for a pound, so you probably heard both — you’re probably mystified by this entire post.

We covered “2541” in Sedan Delivery just a couple of years later, and it was always so much fun to just play that simple, skittering beat and sing (unmiked, but I didn’t care) the chorus from behind the drums, just like I’d being singing it around my apartment, at the radio station and in my car for the two years prior.

And just like it’ll be in my head for the rest of the day after writing this.

“2541”

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