Dan Wilson tells the story behind Semisonic's "Closing Time"

by Jake Mohan, Reveille Magazine • June 25, 2008 • The mission statement of the non-profit PUSH Institute (“dedicated to the spirit of inquiry, organizing research around basic lines of discovery”) and this year’s PUSH Conference theme (“The Fertile Delta” explored “through the lenses of economics, politics, religion and technology”) suggests that the Institute is a progressive organization that places a premium on innovation and creative growth in all fields. And after attending the opening night gala at the Walker, featuring a performance by Dan Wilson, I’m convinced that they have excellent taste in music as well.

Things kicked off when conference attendees—“futurists, academicians, business experts and artists” according to press materials—filed into the Walker cinema for a solo theater performance by Jenni Wolfson, then Wilson.

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The setting afforded Wilson an unusually intimate and elegant venue for his songs. “I’m accustomed to walking onto the stage with a bunch of drunks talking really loud,” he admitted at the beginning of his thirty-minute set.

Wilson switched between piano and acoustic guitar, showcasing material from last year’s Free Life, opening with “Easy Silence” (a track he originally penned for the Dixie Chicks) and closing with the title track; in between were “Hand On My Heart,” “All Kinds,” and “Honey Please.” Toward the end of the set, he launched into some extensive stage banter about a hypothetical rock singer who writes a song about fathering a child, and treated the audience to a sample in the form of a parodic verse: “I planted a seed / and I watched it grow / and now you’re here, Junior / and I’m so so in love with you / ‘cause you look like me, just like me.”

This was the prelude to an “annotated” version of Semisonic’s hit “Closing Time,” with Wilson explaining before the song and, between verses, how the lyrics are actually about childbirth, a metaphor “hidden in plain sight.” He wrote the song while he and his wife were expecting their first child, and in a cosmic coincidence, took his daughter home from the hospital on the same day the single was released.

“I’m allowing myself one year to tell that story onstage,” Wilson told me afterwards. “I started last October, so I have until this October.” When I mentioned another common theory, that the song is about graduation, he said, “Exactly. Or death!”

Indeed, Wilson prefers leaving his lyrics open to interpretation. “Sometimes the fans have better explanations for them than I do,” he said. “I remember reading an interview with Paul McCartney where he said that ‘Jet’ was about a dog. I was so bummed.”

I figured Wilson would be sick of playing “Closing Time” by now, but he managed to revive and re-contextualize this once-ubiquitous hit single in a refreshing way. The other songs sounded great, too, especially the ones performed on piano, which sounded richer and more melancholy in that venue, and on that instrument. It’s motivated me to give Free Life yet another listen, then work my way back through Wilson’s oeuvre to the Trip Shakespeare albums I couldn’t stop playing throughout high school.