jeremy renner's new album, reviewed (pt. 2)
(Previously, I reviewed Jeremy Renner’s 2020 EP, Live For Now.)
I follow Jeremy Renner on Instagram, because my life is a suicide note brought to life by a depressed child’s wish. In case you don’t follow the comings and goings of two-time Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner as closely as I do, let me recap some of the events of the past year:
In early 2023, Jeremy Renner was crushed by a snowplow near his home in Lake Tahoe, breaking more than 30 bones.
He released a new album today called Love and Titanium, chronicling his recovery and newfound hatred for snowplows.
(Side note: you just know Jeremy was pissed that he had already named his 2020 album Live For Now, because that is the perfect title for an album all about recovering from a harrowing snowplow accident. That would be like naming your album Giardia Will Never Kill Me and then recovering from a life-threatening case of giardia three years later.)
Anyway, here are the tracks on Love and Titanium, reviewed honestly.
“Lucky Man”
“Guess I’m just a lucky man,” auto-croons Renner over a jangly guitar and faithfully whoo-whooing choir. This is one of the more forgettable songs about getting every bone in your body broken by a Sno-Cat near your home in Lake Tahoe, right after “Mean Mr. Mustard” by the Beatles. As with every Renner song, it’s painfully literal. “One day you just wake up and finally realize/life is so goddamn beautiful,” he says, directly plagiarizing me from the other night when I was stoned in front of my fridge and then remembered there was half a stromboli inside.
“The River”
This song is all about finding the will to survive after a harrowing snowplow accident. It sounds like it belongs in a commercial for a car called The Excavator or something. My four-year-old nephew walked in the room while I was playing this song on repeat and I instinctively slammed my laptop shut like I was watching porn. (Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t believe in exposing children to Jeremy Renner’s music career until late adolescence.) Anyway, this song sounds like it’s meant to play beneath an aggressively uplifting video of Jeremy Renner undergoing physical therapy, which it probably will in a few weeks.
“Wait”
Finally, a song all about pleading with a snowplow not to crush you near your home in Lake Tahoe. Just kidding! It’s a love song asking someone to “wait/wait/stay and you’ll figure me out.” I bet if you pushed a cube into Jeremy Renner’s chest and unlocked what makes him tick it would be 700 chicken wings and a picture of his family. If there’s one thing listening to his music has taught me, it’s that Jeremy Renner is not a complicated man. And that’s OK! Can you imagine how crazy we’d all feel if Jeremy Renner dropped a Fiona Apple album on us? How nuts we’d all go if Shameika said he had potential? I’d be forced to drive a second snowplow to Jeremy’s house and rev it menacingly outside his bedroom window.
“Love and Titanium”
The worst thing about having my finger firmly on the pulse of Jeremy Renner’s music is that the lyrics for these songs aren’t even posted online yet, so I actually have to listen to what he’s saying in these songs. This one is about being “full of love and titanium” and argues that “heaven knows that life is just a one-way road”. I would posit that life is more like a series of roundabouts crawling with escaped zoo animals, but that’s why he’s the one with a 25-minute-long album about snowplow trauma and I’m a childless cat lady with bipolar disorder.
I can’t reiterate enough how much all these songs sound the same. It’s like trying to rank somebody’s toenails - pointless and gross.
“Garden of Stone”
Wow! This song actually has some interesting components to it: an engaging piano throughline and some lush instrumentation give it a bit of life. But then there’s Jeremy Renner’s voice warbling over it all, which feels like someone made you a fresh hot pizza and then put your most recent water bill on top of it. Where’s the ballad from the POV of the snowplow? I’d pay upwards of 75 cents to hear that!
“Lonesome Town”
Renner reaches for rock god status with this soaring ode to building a life “far away from this lonesome town,” probably because he was decidedly in a lonesome town when he was in the snowplow accident that crushed every bone in his body. I’m just saying, if I survived a horrific snowplow accident, I would hope to make a less generic album afterwards. Every song would be called, like, “I’m Going To Start Having Weirder Sex Now, Just Because I Am Alive” or “You Can’t Tell Me Where To Park Anymore (I Have Seen The Face Of God)!”
“Survive”
This is probably the best song on the album, which is sad because it sounds like a number from an Imagine Dragons Broadway rock opera. “Gotta take me alive/I was born to survive/and I [something??]/and I’m ready to fight for what’s mine.” What is there to say about this song that I haven’t already said about the other six songs? It’s about surviving a snowplow accident, but it sounds like it’s about someone completing a particularly tough workout. After all, who am I to judge? This is the music of Jeremy Renner’s bones and heart and soul.
Beneath Jeremy Renner’s bedroom window, I sit perched atop the snowplow I traded my cats for and rev it low and slow. Just enough to remind Jeremy Renner to watch his fucking back.
In the dark, the snowplow waits.
SETH. I don't know why I was drinking water while reading this, because I almost spit it out about six times, including the second sentence. Thank you for this important cultural document!!