Replacements – Nowhere Is My Home

I thought I knew most of the Replacements catalog, but this one somehow slipped past me. This song was recorded in early 1985 during sessions that eventually led up to Tim. What caught my attention immediately was the producer, Alex Chilton. Yes, that Alex Chilton from Big Star, one of the bands that influenced Paul Westerberg and the Replacements. The song didn’t make Tim, but it eventually appeared on the 1986 UK compilation Boink!! and later as a bonus track on the 2008 reissue of Tim.

The Chilton sessions took place at Nicollet Studios in Minneapolis in 1985. Along with this song, the band worked on early versions of Can’t Hardly Wait and Left of the Dial. Chilton produced this, and I really like the sound he got from the band. It’s still rough around the edges, because it wouldn’t be the Replacements otherwise, but the song has plenty of feeling underneath it.

That was always one of the things I liked most about Paul Westerberg. The Replacements could be a total train wreck. Westerberg could certainly be a out there himself, especially onstage, but then he could turn around and write something incredibly sensitive. The song looks at someone living without a real home or place to belong. Westerberg doesn’t turn the person into a character to laugh at or preach about. There is loneliness running through the song, and he lets that speak for itself.

That side of Westerberg sometimes gets lost behind all the stories about drunken shows and the band’s self-destructive behavior. Listen to songs such as Unsatisfied, Here Comes a Regular, Skyway, Bastards of Young, or this one, and you hear a songwriter who paid attention to people who didn’t quite fit in. He could write about loneliness and disappointment without making it sound overly sentimental. That’s not easy to do.

For me, Westerberg is probably my favorite songwriter to come out of the 1980s. I’m listening to the songs. This one is another example of why I rate him so highly. It also makes me wonder what Tim might have sounded like if Alex Chilton had produced the entire album. We will never know, but this recording gives us a pretty interesting glimpse of what might have been. Even decades later, there are still Replacements songs hiding around corners waiting for me to find them.

Nowhere Is My Home

Out to sea in a ship full of holes
Even though
With a heave and a ho
Gonna raise my sails
Rent a penthouse but sleep on a bench
Pass me the wrench
Take a shovel and a wrench
To this jail

I ain’t deserted
Just feel so disconcerted
I ain’t deserted at all

Sun beats down, neck turns red
In a toolshed, piss in the dirt
Put it right here on my arm
Where they hurt and bled
Commit a crime, in the world of straw
Perfect flaw
Now I fall apart

I ain’t deserted
Just feel so disconcerted

Nowhere
That’s my home, dear
Nowhere
Is where I’m from
Nowhere
Ain’t too far from here

Pitch a tent in a parking ramp
Postage stamp
On a milk carton, a missing kid
Ends up in the trash again, again

And now I got no answers
I got no clue, what will I do?

Nowhere
That’s my home dear
Nowhere
Is where I’m from
Nowhere
Ain’t too far from here

I ain’t deserted
Just feel so disconcerted
I ain’t got no answers now
I ain’t got no home at all

No, no, no
Nowhere at all
No, no, no
Nowhere at all
No, no, no
Nowhere at all
No, no, no
Nowhere at all