‘I’ll Be You’: Paul Westerberg’s most personal song for The Replacements
Few bands in the 1980s won such a devoted fan base as cult Minneapolis band The Replacements. Blasting out their first two albums with punk fury, 1984’s Let It Be would branch out into American alternative rock, occupying the same left-of-the-dial college radio spaces as the likes of Hüsker Dü or early REM. Cutting a unique presence in the musical underground, frontman and principal songwriter Paul Westerberg’s curious blend of internal lyrical disparagement and earnestly confessional vocal offerings brought a fervent following across their heyday.
Yet, serious commercial success eluded them. Despite signing with Sire for 1985’s Tim, the small but passionate devotees The Replacements had won the hearts of never quite expanded to the mainstream, forever languishing in the lowly bottom quarter of the Billboard 200, if charting at all. Westerberg harboured a reluctant relationship with the potential for fame, committed to his band but flexing a contrarian belligerence to the label pressure to chase that much-badgered hit.
There was something of a saboteur about him, quite happy to play live shows drunk, complete with confusing setlists and even insulting the crowd to ensure extra scuppering of widening their appeal.
It seemed by 1989’s Don’t Tell a Soul that Sire might finally have their long-awaited hit. Despite Westerberg’s ambivalence about Chris Lord-Alge’s beefed-up mix, the band seemingly entered a new sonic realm ostensibly perfect for radio play. Eyed up by label executives, ‘I’ll Be You’ was pushed as the album’s lead single, given a flashy video and receiving heavy promotion by both Sire and the parent company Reprise, The Replacements scored their biggest hit yet, peaking at a respectable yet still underwhelming 51 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The pressure for making a hit is smattered all over ‘I’ll Be You’s’ lyrical pangs, pouring out his inner turmoil for a commercial grab at odds with his diffident personality. As if viewing a future self enjoying the fruits of pop stardom, Westerberg looks from a distance at another ‘him’ that occupies a potential path he struggles in his heart to follow with vim.
The crowds briefly became bigger. “We were noticing the audience was doubling at our shows and all of them came because they heard ‘I’ll Be You’,” he recalled in 2016’s Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, the Last Rock ‘n’ Roll Band. “And a couple of nights, in our own fashion, we even forgot to play the damn thing. Once we started to get hip to it, we would play it right off the bat and half the people would leave.”
Ultimately, Westerberg just didn’t have it in him, even later expressing relief that ‘I’ll Be You’s’ high yet lacklustre chart performance meant he wouldn’t have to play the song every gig for the rest of his life. Their last stab at success tantalisingly just out of reach, The Replacements would drop one more album with 1990’s All Shook Down before disbanding the following year.
Westerberg would pursue a solo career, and the group would reunite for sporadic shows over the years, but ‘I’ll Be You’ stands as the most naked insight into the frontman’s troubled wishes and fraught desires in life, a stark realisation that he was much more alive and kicking on music’s fringes.
