Top 10 Closing Tracks
NOTE: This is a piece that I had written earlier this year. It was meant as a writing exercise with a friend of mine. Originally a post on Medium (Feb. 20th, 2019), I am duplicating it here.
I suppose it isn’t all that surprising that there aren’t a flood of high-quality Top 10 Closing Tracks lists on the internet. I mean, I thought that if a website drummed up a Top 10 Opening Tracks list, then surely the opposite would net an easy two-for-oner. Especially if you get a little wild on that Opener list and put in “Bat Out of Hell”while conveniently forgetting “Everything In Its Right Place.” Oh, boy. You’re gonna get twitchy nerds out there, clenching fists and tweaking necks at the very idea that you failed to fellate their opinion properly, making sure to cup their not-at-all-forced diverse taste in music, before swallowing every last drop of their nauseating false enthusiasm for Spiderland. You just know that those little fingers are hovering above the keyboard, just waiting, waiting for you to soil the internet with your trash opinions. Look, I don’t know if that type of person exists. I’m sure they do, but so what? It doesn't take anything away from what I like, or what makes sense to me.
I think this brings up a problem that I have in my life as a whole, and not just limited to criticism. I am too often seeking validation from someone instead of trusting myself. I think it stems from a friend of mine I had in middle school and into high school. He was the type of person who demanded attention, maybe because of his massive rust-colored afro, or maybe because he was just so different. Only later I realized that he must have craved and hunted for things that he could use as an identity to separate himself from everyone. He would jump through so many hoops, just so you could see how unique he was, how ahead of everyone he was, or how little everything meant to him. The best example I have of this is, appropriately enough, related to music.
I went over to his house one day, and climbed the stairs to his room. I worshiped that house, that room, everything about the way he lived was so fucking cool. I wanted a mattress on the floor. I wanted to paint my room dark. I wanted to get a dope sound system. I wanted to be him so badly. I walked into his room and he was on the computer, in some music software. Probably iTunes. He was scrolling through, playing songs, maybe showing me something he found. He was always looking for something new to show to people, either to impress them or to weird them out. Well, “new.” Nothing is actually new, not at that age. But I still have no idea if he actually liked any of that stuff,, or if he was like me, painfully piecing together an identity.
So I was up in his room, listening to music, when I noticed that every single track ID, including name, artist, album, was all just a bunch of gibberish like this: hghdghdf, or 22222, or some form of .’s or ,’s. I think about that a lot, actually, kinda like everything about my time with him. Even from me, his friend (I would have said best friend but I don’t think that was ever really true) he would not tell me anything about these songs to protect his little treasure trove. Who does that? Who the fuck is so worried that someone is going to jack your style or your precious little gem you found, and run it into the ground? I mean, really, who is like that?
I was, at that age, and probably because of him. I still find myself actively fighting against that mentality. But one thing that I did not inherit from him was doing anything to keep my self-image painstakingly unique. Still, there are some facets of my personality that won’t go away even after he went away. (I remember sometime in 11th grade showing up to where we used to eat lunch together and he wasn’t there. I thought he was sick or something, but he never showed back up. I would see him at school occasionally, as we didn’t have any classes together. But we never spoke again.) Probably the most affecting and occasionally debilitating part of myself he had a hand in molding is my fervent need for validation. Am I cool enough? Am I smart enough? Am I talented enough? I still wonder about these things to this day.
I had planned to outline my process for whittling down this list; what I didn’t put and why, what I did end up with and why etc. Turns out that I had more I needed to say, but unlike a recipe you’d find on somebody’s lifestyle blog, I think that it’s actually related.
I seem to struggle with what to put on lists like these for reasons that have nothing to do with the music. Well I have to put X on here because it’s a classic. Well I’m not as familiar with X but I have to consider it, right? Well I think I need some of X here because it looks like a weird list. All the other lists I’ve looked at have these songs and i don’t have any of those. Maybe I don’t know music as well as I thought? Maybe I need to go back and listen to X more because that music is good music. I know because everyone seems to think so. On and on and on and on and I think you can tell why I arrived here, now, writing this and looking up at what I have written already.
The thing that this list helped me to realize is that these differences I have with, I dunno any rando jagweed on the street or online are okay. I don’t have “Won’t Get Fooled Again” on here. I love that song. But it doesn’t do anything for me. It’s not as important to me. Same with “When The Levee Breaks.” That one was on my list for a very long time. And I kept looking over it saying, “No, I should keep that. It should be on there.” Then it just kinda snapped in me recently: why? Why should it be on my list, an expression of my point-of-view? I think it slaps, don’t get me wrong. But I think I’ve heard that song maybe 4 or 5 times all the way through in my entire life. This must have repeated a number of times because just in the last few days, my list has gotten much smaller.
And I think that’s the takeaway here, at the end of the day. I think that finding your voice, finding your self-confidence, being sure of yourself and what you know, and seeing value in your perspective and your experience are concepts that, for me, have taken a long time to accept for find. And, of course, I’m still not totally sure of who I am, or what value I have. But I know what I like, and hopefully I can articulate why I like it. Otherwise this is going to be a pain in the ass for both of us.
HONORABLE MENTION: SLAYER - RAINING BLOOD
Honorable mentions are, in my previous history of cataloguing as a form of expression, usually reserved for songs that lack the same depth as the actual numbered list. The idea of depth is a bit subjective, as we very well might explore in the coming tracks. But no matter what, I think it just means that things are layered. What those things are, and in what ordered are they valued sort of dictates how I compile these lists. Layering musical concepts, motifs, lyrics, or intent (and probably a bajillion other things) is what can make an album or a song interesting, fulfilling, or even universally important to popular culture as a whole.
Raining Blood has no layers. Raining Blood just fuckin’ rules.
The lyrics are shallow and almost clunky in their attempts of verbosity, the guitar solos are these incoherent expressions of pure insanity. But it’s so fast, and it’s so heavy, and it’s one of the best examples of how to end an album, full stop: Literal god-blood is falling from the sky.
The first comment on that video up there describes this as the National Anthem of Metal, and I have to agree.
10. FRANZ FERDINAND - 40’
My favorite thing that Franz Ferdinand do, when it all makes sense, when their sometimes disperate pieces fit, is when they get weird and they get creepy and they get dark. “Evil Eye” sounds like a single for a tent-pole live-action Castlevania movie, back when they used to do that sort of thing. “Ulysses” is a paranoid drug-fueled romp that may or may not have ended with a blacked-out murder or some other orgasmic end to the night.
“40'” is the end to a suddenly-everywhere of an album. Good lord, can you remember a time back then when “Take Me Out” wasn’t playing somewhere? Grab a shiny new iPod Mini off of anyone on the street and I can bet it would be on there. But for it’s pervasiveness as a nü-disco pop smash, “40'” always felt different, something drew me in more than a simple hook. It has that, but its big chorus is a creeping, carnival-like guitar line. The drums open up with each time the narrator seemingly jumps off the forty-foot cliff, only to return and find themselves peering over the edge once more. It feels like a descent into madness.
09. JOYCE MANOR - CONSTANT HEADACHE
Is it a song about a one night stand that, for one of the participants at least, turned into something much more? Or is it written from the point of view of a dog? What, or who, is the constant headache? What is a dead pet device? Most of the words I have about this song are questions, and I am fine with that. What matters is less about what it is and more about what it does.
Seeing some of these songs live has definitely informed so much of how I feel about them. “Constant Headache” would not be on this list if I was never fortunate enough to see it live, multiple times; every time I’ve been to a Joyce Manor show. It’s a staple. I simply has to be played. I have a few memories, some generic and some specific, that I occasionally pull out of my bag of shows I’ve been to since I was a sophomore. “Constant Headache,” from any year, at any venue, amidst any technical issues, is one of my favorites.
There is a certain phenomenon that happens when you see live performance art, be it a band or a play or whatever. Other people have described and illustrated it more poetically than I can, and I’m sure it goes by different names, depending on who you ask. When it’s good, it’s good, and you can feel it. It’s palpable. Whether it’s quiet, tense moments of people in awe of something they have never seen before (ironically, my strongest memory of this in particular, was seeing Girlpool open up for Joyce Manor), or it’s moment when everyone is joining in together, to sing, to dance, or to beat the shit out of each other. What connects all of these types of moments together is a type of energy that a mass of people can give off. It’s like every individual in that crowd is breathing together, and everyone is thinking the exact same thing, and every thought or memory or experience looks different but it all feels the same.
08. THE MENZINGERS - FREEDOM BRIDGE
Throughout On the Impossible Past, there are stories of heartbreak and sadness, economic strife and drug abuse, and the idolization and eventual disillusionment of the American Dream™. They are tales from the Rust Belt, the often misunderstood faux-midwest economic cesspool, littered with the failures of elected officials. It’s a part of America that some would like to forget, but for those living there, it seems like nothing is more American.
Through a series of examples that hit close to home, either literal people I know, or shapes of people (ghosts, really, but nonetheless valid and knowable) live their lives trying to fill the void. Whether that be drugs, alcohol, money, distraction, or any other way to make it through another day. The area that I come from is far away from the rivers and bridges and train tracks of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. But I find striking similarities in the stories I can tell, or have been told to me, about Lake Elsinore, California (and much of the Inland Empire) and the stories that are told on this album.
I know a place that sounds just like the Fire Street Grill. I know Specialist Jeg and I know his PTSD. I’ve heard stories about our McTeirnan and what he did. I’ve driven around, smoking cigarettes while friends got high or drunk, trying to kill the day, trying to fit in. I know the ghosts, the friends of friends that have died on the long stretches of freeway, either by accidents or by their own design. I know the existential purgatory that these places embody. I know that few people make it out alive, and that years pass like minutes.
This album came out the same year that I finally left the area, as I had always wanted. So it became something to play on repeat, a prayer to sing, a hallelujah. But unlike me, Amy, Specialist Jeg, and McTeirnan did not make it out. And due to the nature of the medium, they would never make it out like me. No matter how many times I play it, the people in the song, the people I knew, the names and faces that have littered the area, they are all consumed by their sadness, their loneliness, their sickness, their greed. For them, life never delivered on the promise of happiness or wealth, measured with whatever stick you want to use, it doesn’t particularly matter. The only way they could leave, the only choice they felt they could make on their own terms, was to jump.
07. THE STREETS - EMPTY CANS
A Grand Don’t Come For Free tells a story about Mike Skinner, a traditional working class character who starts his journey with the worst of days, the kind of day that can ruin a whole week, or a month. The kind of day where absolutely everything that can go wrong, does. And at the end of it, he’s found out that he’s lost £1,000, the inciting incident that kicks off this concept album/hip-hopera, a term I just made up but I’m sure actually exists because it has to.
Roughly speaking, things do not get better for Mike after this. He meets a girl, sure, but it’s a relationship that goes south pretty quickly, with both of them cheating on each other. One of his mates is involved, and the other one seems to be choosing sides against Mike. It’s a clusterfuck of paranoia and accusations, sort of like every opera I’ve ever read about (in passing). And that leads us to this closing track, where Mike is sitting in his flat, “wall-to-wall empty cans,” telling the world to piss off and stewing in his own rage at his friends. “Can you rely on anyone is this world?/No you can’t.”
From here, he tries to get the TV fixed and calls a repairman, instead of taking up his friend Scott's offer to fix it himself. But Mike thinks the repairman is trying to take advantage of him and is looking to extort more money, so they start to fight and he gets banged up pretty bad. He’s left by himself, after losing another fight, and has nothing but his own self-pity to nurse the head-wound he’s just suffered. And that’s where Mike’s story could have ended. But the track is rewound, the beat is the same, but as we go through the first verse, things are different.
We get the same line, the same conclusion: “Can you rely on anyone is this world? No you can’t.” But instead of blaming everyone for his problems, he takes responsibility and admits to himself that while life has been unfair as of late, it’s still within his power to choose how to handle it. He texts one of his friends, Scott, and tries to reconcile. Scott offers to help fix his TV and instead of dismissing him like the first time around, Mike agrees. Scott comes over, they unscrew the plate, and in a bit of irony they find the £1,000 that Mike lost, wedged in the back of the TV.
What fascinates me about this dual narrative right at the end is not so much the form itself (although I am a fan of doing something that can play around with conventions and give us two totally different stories that are both absolutely true and earned) but with what he uses the form to do. The story is a wonderful comment on the state of working class people in regards to the economic discourse and the way these things impact mental health. It’s such a simple, small story but it’s also a thoughtful and beautiful picture of the human condition: “Scott can’t have my back ’til the absolute end/’Cause he’s got to look out for what’s over his horizon/He’s gotta make sure he’s not lonely, not broke/It’s enough to worry about keeping his own head above.”
06. BANE - ALI V. FRAZIER I
Hardcore punk has its fair share of tracks that bring down the house. It’s kind of their MO. It’s what you expect. What could be worse than seeing a boring punk band? And in a scene filled with great tracks (closing or otherwise) that end with a bang, that get the crowd moving and chanting along, “Ali v. Frazier I” is the song that does it for me. The reasons are more personal than structural. The song doesn’t end in any sort of chugging, hardcore breakdown like something you would typically hear from a band around this time. It’s still a breakdown, and something you can mosh to, if you so choose. But it’s about the call-and-response, the rise to action. Ralph Waldo Emerson would have loved Bane.
Give Blood is a loose concept album about going on tour. A commonality between hardcore punk and prog-rock is their fascination and dedication to touring. The grind, the travel, the set-up, the execution, the interaction, all of it. I think what is most important, what needs to be stressed is the grind. Wake up, in the van, go to the next venue in the next city, set up, perform, break down, get back in the van, do it again, repeat for sometimes up to a couple years at a time. The dedication to the art of performance is what they live for and the kids showing up, singing their hearts out, is what fuels them. It’s a grind, it’s work, it’s a fight, and it’s done over and over and over because it’s what you believe in.
This kind of raw positivity has always felt a little foreign to me. I’m more comfortable, like many of my generation, in a kind of detached irony. It’s difficult to engage sometimes, maybe out of embarrassment or, to reference my own struggles in the introduction, out of fear of dropping the mask of being cool. So it’s refreshing and admirable when I see the next generation, maybe the next two depending on where you draw those lines, find nourishment in caring and engaging. I’m old sometimes, I think, in the way I often rely on cynicism as a form of security, as intellectual/spiritual/emotional junk food.
What I need now, more than ever, is “Ali v. Frazier I.” What I want, what I crave, is the motivation to stick with something, to find a purpose in it. I know the person that I want to be, I know the life I want to live and the life I want to give others. And that life is there, it’s just fucking sitting there, waiting to be taken. I constantly have to fight how cheesy this whole concept is to me, but I’ll never get what I want, I’ll never be that person, if I don’t put myself out there and get something done. It’s inspiring to me to have this whole project, this top 10 list, come at the beginning of a new year. It’s given me a new old mantra: “Give all/Give everything/Give blood.”
05. AGAINST ME! - SEARCHING FOR A FORMER CLARITY
Coming off of being folk-punk darlings, Against Me! releases Searching For A Former Clarity to the chagrin of longtime fans, mainly due to it’s pop appeal and short song titles (I wish I was making that up). It ends with a surprisingly down tempo, heart-on-its-sleeve title track that, from what I remember (my memory is faulty), sort of went under the radar. It wasn’t until Laura Jane Grace came out as trans that this song became much more prescient. It represents her then-indescribable gender dysphoria as a disease that seems to take over her body, although for further disassociation the song is in the second person. It’s a fascinating and honest confession, at a time in which many people didn’t know what to do with it.
In 2008 I took a road trip with 4 of my closest friends crammed into my Civic. I had recently took the plunge into the discography of Against Me!, which really only consisted of three main albums, and found myself playing this record on repeat. That discovery bled into the trip north and it became the go-to CD to pop in whenever it was my turn to drive. By the end of our journey, on the side of the highway in Medford with a blown-out tire, this became out de-facto anthem. Looking back, I don’t totally understand why it appealed to all of us, why we all gravitated towards it.
Perhaps we all took something different from it. While I can’t relate to how Laura Jane Grace must have felt writing this song, I can relate to a part of yourself dying. I had just gone through a break-up that was particularly tough on me. It’s fucking hokey, sure, but I was much younger. And being on an open highway, looking at the future of everything, including my relationships to the young men packed into a tiny car with me, I couldn’t help but feel that this was the death of an old life and the beginning of something different, something scary.
I think the outro in particular appealed to all of us at the time. It’s a bit of a bummer, but it’s this end to a story and it’s an end to an album, one that very literally was played on repeat. It’s the image of someone dying, someone falling apart, and asking for forgiveness for everything. It doesn’t matter how sheltered you grew up, or how straight-laced you may be, there’s something (especially at that age) that we all deeply regret. Combine this with the way the song builds itself up until the outro where the instruments are suddenly stripped away, pulling the rug out from under you, sending you in a type of free fall, and it becomes easier to see why this affected us.
What makes it so powerful and so personal is that over the years, it’s taken on a different significance. Early on I could see this transitory phase in our lives, marked by the trip as a kind of death; a freeing release into the unknown boundaries of the future. As it held particular significance to me, as I wanted to express myself and my feelings toward that time, I wrote it all down (or as much of it as I could). It became one of the first long-form pieces of drama I wrote entirely on my own and I ended the entire story with a visual montage set underneath this song. I took creative liberties, of course, but I tried to stay true to the spirit of each of us. But, because this is drama, it ends with one of us (“us”) dying. And I knew that he always seemed to struggle with something. He was temperamental and could be introverted in a way that made sense, knowing him, but in a way that I couldn’t grasp. So his character struggled with mental illness and eventually took his own life.
Years go by and my friend is diagnosed, confirming suspicions and all of a damn sudden making everything a little too fucking real. It’s made this song in particular, take on an entirely new set of signifiers. And I am afraid, again, of the future. Every piece of good news I hear is a relief, yes, thankfully, but whenever I hear nothing, it’s like I can feel a vice gripping him, and I know he just wants it to end. To focus on himself, and to make sure he maintains some stability he has withdrawn and severed his correspondence with the rest of us, for the most part. I’ll miss him. It’s kind of like the trip we all took, where I knew that things won’t be the same as they used to be. And that even good things can die.
04. BEAR VS SHARK - BROKEN DOG LEG
One of my favorite things in this world is when Marc Paffi screams. Bear vs Shark is more than just that, much more, but if I could distill this short-lived band is a single noise it would be that scream. It stands out to me not just as an expression of my own nostalgia (which I will get into), but also as something that made them seem so special, especially compared to the sphere in which they operated.
Equal Vision is an important label, growing more important by the year, it seems, for the bands they signed first or who they had on briefly. They served as the springboard for hardcore punk bands like Bane and H2O as well as a large number of post-hardcore bands like Fear Before the March of Flames and Hopesfall. But the time that Bear vs Shark was around and released this album, 2003, was smack-dab in the middle of a bonafide scene movement, one with a capital S.
I remember reaching the edges of the Scene beach, never quite lumping in. I knew older kids (seniors!) who swam neck-deep in that ocean. Bands, songs, albums, aesthetics, attitudes filtered down from these titans (seniors!) down to me, often via my older sister and her friends and boyfriends. I meticulously collected these relics, but I rarely used them. I preferred to catalogue and observe, rather than participate, and there were certain bands that all felt like they belonged in a set; bands like Chiodos, Amrmor for Sleep, Alexisonfire, Gatsby’s American Dream, Circa Survive, Pierce the Veil, The Fall of Troy, Sky Eats Airplane, We Came As Romans, Coheed and Cambria, etc. Whether or not these bands (all on Equal Vision) represented or embodied the Scene, they were a part of it nonetheless.
Curiously to me, Bear vs Shark was also signed to Equal Vision, and I never quite understood why. What I later came to adopt as the first show I ever attended (one with a lineup I wanted to see, with a ticket I purchased), consisted of Circa Survive (newly formed, obsessed-over darlings of the Scene) and Bear vs Shark (who?) opening up for Gatsby’s American Dream. I went with some of these elder scribes of my local Scene (seniors!), and I immediately felt out of place. There were Scene elders from all over Riverside County and even the wealthy taste-makers in Orange County, and they all swarmed the Circa Survive merch table in seconds flat, purchasing the Husks from which they draw their Powers of Credibility.
“Broken Dog Leg” is the last song off of their debut album Right Now, You’re In The Best Of Hands. And If Something Isn’t Quite Right, Your Doctor Will Know In A Hurry. And it has all the elements that make up a Bear vs Shark song. There is the unmistakable voice of Marc Paffi, the forward guitar tones, the bouncing drums, the abstract lyrics that feel equally at home on the page as off the tongue. What makes it pop for me, though, in the context of closing tracks happens just before the 3-minute mark. It’s a power chord as lightning bolt, Townshend-esque, that starts a fire, burning the entirety of the house down. The song opens up and everything is thrown in together and I fucking love it.
I don’t remember what song they were playing when I saw them live and Marc Paffi straight-up crawled over the crowd to come and softly close my eyes, reaching out to me like the hand of God or something. Maybe that’s what religious experiences are like? All I know is that I was highly intrigued by what the band had to offer and now find myself wanting to spread the word. Was that show a baptism? Possibly, and yes.
Which sort of brings me to the last point I have. I remember almost perfectly the first time I had listened to Bear vs Shark. I was browsing a website that catalogued the lyrics of punk bands. I remember looking through, alphabetically and alt-tabbing to KaZaA or LimeWire when something caught my eye. I remember downloading “Ma Jolie” and “Buses/No Buses,” the first and third tracks of this album respectively, and them being scratched into my soul. Not long after that, I remember inviting my friend (the one I wrote about in the introduction) to the show. He said he would think about it. Days later he came back and told me he listened to the band. “Yeah?” He shook his head. “Not for you?” More shaking. “You’re crazy.”
Maybe it isn’t as significant as I like to think. Maybe there were other instances where I would absolutely disagree with him, and take something I loved and feel unashamed by it. But maybe Marc Paffi reached out to me that night, singled me out over everyone else in that crowd, to tell me that I am fine just the way I am.
03. ALKALINE TRIO - RADIO
The first line from “Radio” is the most quintessential lyric of the most quintessential Alkaline Trio song. It is all the things that Matt Skiba does best: it’s metaphorical, it’s tongue-in-cheek, it’s graphic. “Radio” is the greatest angry break-up song there is, period. It weaves between anger, hurt, and genuine malice with precision. It’s an emotion, however unconventional, that permeates each of us, crossing boundaries and cultures. It’s tapping to a specific type of frustration and pain that I think we all know, instinctively, can cross a line with greater ease than we would like to admit. What we do (most of us anyway) is wallow and walk away, as best as we can, and leave it at that. My favorite thing about “Radio” is how unapologetic it is, how vile and poignant and true it is.
For many, including several people I know (also including myself), “Radio” is the first Alkaline Trio song they hear. Or, alternatively, it’s the only one they hear; it’s the only song under Alkaline Trio when you browse through someone else’s mp3 player (maybe along with “Take Me Out” on their low-storage, sleek-as-hell-kind-of iPod Mini?). Listening to it, in preparation and construction of this list, I’ve been asking myself why that is. It absolutely destroys live sets as a closing song, or as an encore. It’s simple, it’s anthemic. It’s Matt Skiba’s sad, broken voice over a hyper-simple rhythm, acting as a rudder, trying to keep the ship from crashing or tipping over completely. It’s pain is universal, sure, but the other two members of the band are pulling a surprising amount of weight, deceptive in it’s simplicity.
At the time I first heard “Radio,” I had never experienced a break-up, let alone a “Radio” break-up. I had never been in a real relationship of any kind. But the emotional connection I found in the song seemed so obvious and real. Maybe I haven’t experienced anything close to that, but one day I would, and I would look forward to that day: the day I could cry and curse and wallow, where any expression I had would be powerful. Not long after this dream of dreams, I did meet someone and we did start a relationship. And not long after that (in Adult-Time™), things ended badly (for me). I don’t know why I, and others, had this romanticized bad breakup scenario in our heads. Maybe it was just an excuse to feel terrible things and say terrible (re: TRUE) things about your ex. I’m sure that’s at least partly true. Just like I’m sure that the pain I fetishized wasn’t as life-affirming and introspective as I thought. Mostly, I just cried a lot in the shower. So I guess that part ended up being true.
Some songs are just purely around, stuck in your brain (scratched into your soul, if you’d rather), just for the sake of nostalgia. Which, for me anyway, always prompts me to ask myself the same question over and over, be it related to movies, music, people, anything: is this really good (however you want to define that) or is it just nostalgia, the voice in your head that refuses to let go? And maybe good is the wrong word in that question? Maybe, instead of good, what I really mean is universal? After all, if there is anything to learn from this exercise-turned-personal-essay, is that I’ve always needed reassurance, approval, affirmations of looking cool. I still catch myself, from time to time, wondering if I seem eclectic enough, hip enough, detached enough. Some wounds cut deep. I doubt that my former friend even knows how much he rearranged my wires. I doubt he even thinks of me. It probably doesn’t matter, I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t. Do I care? I don’t think I’m being dismissive, I think I might actually be asking: Do I care? Still?
02. MEWITHOUTYOU - IN A SWEATER POORLY KNIT
As an expressed function of the closing track, there needs to be a certain amount of explosiveness. This can be, in the confines of my personal list, represented in three ways (with some of them overlapping). There is the big bang, something like a “Raining Blood.” There is the small bang, that seems to purposefully subvert a show-stopper ending, like “Searching For A Former Clarity.” And then there is this track, “In A Sweater Poorly Knit,” that I see expressed physically as a wide ending. It is both large (width) and small (length), designed to impress while subverting expectations previously established. mewithoutYou seems to do this by creating a diverse soundscape, with their own instruments as well as a memorable blanketing of harp.
“In A Sweater Poorly Knit” might be the most gorgeous song I have ever heard. I hope that sounds a bit nuts, because I feel a little nuts just typing it. I don’t think it’s arguable why I might think that, though the ultimate declaration might be my little hill to die on. mewithoutYou have a way of painting a picture better than any band I know, whether it’s through the accents of ancillary instruments (harp, accordion, flugelhorn, banjo, etc.) or the ability to transform and squeeze out lush tones and patterns from their own, conventional tools. Then to layer them, to build around them, to find a thread (usually Aaron Weiss’ lyrics) and to weave that through textures of sounds and colors of memory, it’s masterful in execution and almost otherworldly in creativity.
What is interesting, then, about “In A Sweater Poorly Knit” is where it sits within their catalogue. It comes at the end of Brother, Sister, an album that saw them start to pick up more melody, more of that layering of sound that I mentioned before, more everything. It was a shift away from Catch For Us The Foxes, which itself was a shift away from (A — >B) Life. This song in particular, on Brother, Sister sounded like a complete step forward (and turned out to be a good indication of what was to come). It, I think, became a sort of litmus test for fans; either you’re in or you’re out. So it seems absolutely bonkers when Brother, Sister became the last stop on the train for many people. For them, however, it became too much, too different from the hardcore punk band playing basements in Philly to a bunch of Christian teenagers who were at an intersection in their lives, between the Scene and the Faith.
Much like how “In A Sweater Poorly Knit” can be representative of a dividing line in their artistic output, mewithoutYou arrived to me at a transitional part of my own life, both artistic and personal. It was 2012 and I was about to (finally) make the move up to Portland. I was the first in my family to make such a long, permanent move, especially for school, and double-especially for a degree in the arts. It seems fitting, in hindsight, that it was very near to my departure that, on a bit of a whim, I listened to Ten Stories (an album whose closing track almost found a home on this list in addition to this one) for the first time. I don’t believe that there is a finer album from this band, on a whole. To this day (post-Untitled) I still think it is the purest artistic expression of this band and their history. But that discussion might be a whole other project. Shortly after devouring Ten Stories I was caught, that dull hook in my lip (to borrow an expression). mewithoutYou became the de-facto soundtrack of my new home and my new life.
My new life being a bit obsessed by and consumed with both writing personal projects and writing for school. Suffice to say, I had images on my mind, nearly all the time. Everything I felt or saw or thought was a line in a notebook, filed away for use on some new project. Music became a big contributor to what I saw in my mind’s eye, maybe more than anything other external stimuli. So when digging through past mewithoutYou albums, new to my own ears, I came across In A Sweater Poorly Knit.” And I think what struck me most about it, in those first days or weeks or months with that song, was how cinematic it felt. Using Ten Stories as a foundation, and “In A Sweater Poorly Knit” as an example, on August 12th, 2013 I wrote down in my notebook the following: “Idea — Bone adaptation w/ score & original songs by mewithoutYou.”
I feel so embarrassed to put that down in such a permanent, public way. But it sat in my mind, and sort of grew larger and larger, until (to this day still) it firmly affixed itself to my brain. It became something of fantasy, what I might be inclined to now call a pipe dream. It became something to work toward, something that felt, to me, like a goal. One attainable and with merit and one marred by rough terrain, but one that I was willing to trudge toward. These days it just reminds me of how I’ve failed my younger self.
I think I carry a lot of shame about that dream, and it only seems to magnify whenever I fail to try, even with the smallest of steps. And the more I fail to start anything, the more I start to question why I write in the first place. Do I really think that could ever happen? If I wanted it so badly, why am I so unmotivated? Why was that idea logged almost 6 years ago, and I have nothing to show that I’ve made any progress? I want to change, I want to be better, I want to accomplish something, I really, desperately do. I am trying to change. But it feels like I have to fight myself, even just on the very idea of working on a project. Have I become disenchanted with the whole thing? Is it something I even want anymore? If not, then who am I? Just lazy? If so, then I disgust myself. And if not then I don’t know who I am or what I want to do.
01. THE WONDER YEARS - I JUST WANT TO SELL OUT MY FUNERAL
I’ve listened to this song on repeat for the past couple days. This song, and by extension the whole album (more on that in a bit) is usually stuck in my head somewhere. Whether it’s rattling around somewhere below the surface, or it pop out whenever I am scrolling through my Spotify, trying to find something to listen to. It’s so present in me, that I have to stop myself from playing it during those expeditions through my music library. “I just listened to this the other day. I can’t play the whole thing. I can’t just choose one. I should listen to something else, just to mix it up. I don’t want to be one of those people that constantly plays the same thing over and over, like get over it, already, that time has passed.” None of those thoughts should surprise you, if you’ve read this far. But more than any recent album, I can’t seem to shake the looming shadow it casts over the other music in my life. It’s a buoy, a lighthouse, a handrail. And it might be something I need in my life, the more it feels like I’m adrift.
“I Just Want To Sell Out My Funeral” is the finale rack at the end of The Greatest Generation, an album about the suburbs, teenage parents, economic hardships, fighting in war, gospel music on long road trips in the middle of nowhere, and the unique resonance of Americana that pulses and flows through each of these. Immediately, what makes this closing track so special is how previous themes, lyrics, and movements return in overt, identifiable, interpolate ways. There is a word, one of my favorite words, related to music: melisma, or several notes sung on one syllable. In this particular metaphor, the notes are the reprises and the syllable is Dan “Soupy” Cambell’s lyrics, trying to find his voice, overcome his fear of failure, and doing something worth talking about.
Originally, some months ago, I assembled a rough list of possible candidates to be included on this list. I think it was as early as that original expedition that I knew “I Just Want To Sell Out My Funeral” would be my number one (or, at the very least, a heavy favorite). So, I continued to whittle and parse down to what I have here, with the full assumption that at the end of the list there would be a given, this song. So why would I need to think about it much, when lower down on the list things were getting a bit heated? And so there it sat, at the end of the line, all wrapped up like a present, waiting for me to open it and poke around.
One of the powerful side-effects of music, and all art, is its ability to connect people to experiences, either lived or vicarious, and then to each other, using these experiences as a line, like one you would draw on a page to complete a shape. When I opened that present, I found this shape. I just thought I was getting a cool, flashy song that did something neat, that eschewed pop-punk conventions. I never expected to find my own fears and anxieties, things that have only been growing since I compiled that rough list. It’s as if I gave myself this song, like a fire alarm, to break open in case of emergency. Because some songs just seem to make sense, some songs speak their language directly to you, as if you, personally, were the intended recipient. They can give you the words to express things that were otherwise inaccessible to you. It reminds me of that Alkaline Trio line that goes, “…all of my favorite singers have stolen all of my best lines.”
Where mewithoutYou’s “In A Sweater Poorly Knit” represented a previous time in my life and then tracing the line of that to the present day, “I Just Want To Sell Out My Funeral” appears to be me contending with where I am now, “staring out at where I want to be.” Narrative convention and intuition is telling me that this is a point in time where a choice has to be made. I can keep battling my own apathy and self-destructive cynicism, accept that failure is an option, and push through spells of inactivity. Or I can drop the charade, be realistic (defeatist), and find something more manageable.
And suddenly I’m in front of a face that I can’t recall the features of. It’s hazy, obfuscated. What I can see, and what stands out despite their black color, are a pair of finger-less gloves. They’re knit, and look like they were probably cut intentionally. I’m at a party, sometime shortly after moving up here and starting school. Finger-less Gloves is outside, the kind of person that’s permanently outside at a party, chain-smoking and catty. I’m talking to him, although I can’t seem to remember why I did in the first place. “Are you also in the service industry?” he asks me, referring to the mutual acquaintance, the one whose house we’re at. I tell him no. I tell him I just moved up here for school. I tell him I’m studying film, and I’m going to be a writer. “Oh,” he says, “Well, I’m sure you’ll be working the service industry soon enough.”
To this day it still feels like there is someone lurking over me, sometimes it’s Finger-less Gloves, sometimes it’s my old friend. Either way, they represent the same thing: that what I want is foolish, that I’m not somebody that has anything important to say, or that I’m just wasting my time chasing after, really, just a vague sense of validation. They’re my own anxieties that I can just slap a face or an otherness onto. So how do I make a choice, at this narrative crossroad, to keep going? Any sort of promise to myself, any sort of firm commitment absolutely terrifies me.
But what if they’re wrong? What if the motivation I am looking for are actually my greatest fears? What if by achieving a piece of what I want, even just a small bit, I can rid myself of these ghosts and their penchant for haunting my faculties, like demons in a toaster? This whole list thing has transformed into such a different piece. It’s given me a chance to reflect on my own shortcomings, yes, but also the things that inspire me, and the reasons to be excited, and how I can use my own fears as pointed sticks, to own them, and to make them work for me. I’m still looking for validation, sure. But these flaws and memories are what I’ve been given. And I think I, too, need to know that I’ve done all I could with them, including, occasionally, to let some of them go.