For years, I've been wanting to do a running commentary on why I like certain songs, just throw up a music video and break down the compositional elements it comprises, to try to pinpoint what, in the songwriting, makes me put a certain song on repeat on Spotify.
And when this thing comes to fruition, it'll mostly be about the steady 90s slow-dance aesthetic in Florence and the Machine's "Never Let Me Go" or the meter changes in The National's "Fake Empire" and Wolf Parade's "I'll Believe in Anything." It'll be fun, and lighthearted, and involve as much theory as I remember from my ill-spent couple semesters as a music composition minor in undergrad. That's where this string of posts (I can't speak for Paul and Ryan) is going.
But to start, I'm going with something a song that I connect to almost purely on an emotional level, which means this is going to sound childish and pretentious and that this blog will be born under a bad sign. But here it is.
I'm extremely open about my life on Twitter and on the sites I write for. Which is probably irritating for people who read my stuff because they like baseball and basketball, but it's the only thing I know how to do. But one place I draw the line is wallowing in personal self-pity in public. Part of that is that I'm worried that someone who wants to hire me to write about sports and entertainment full-time (which is what I ultimately want to do with my life) will read some woe-is-me thing I wrote in a fit of drunken pique and change his or her mind. Part of it is that I was granted more natural and social advantages than 99 percent of the other people on Earth, and despite having failed to cash in on those for reasons no more profound than my own fear and laziness, if you made some sort of objective scale of utility in people's lives, I'd still end up somewhere near the top. And under those circumstances it's unseemly to complain.
But my relationship with this song is rooted in having experienced what I truly hope is rock bottom for me, when, for the first time in my life I took a major risk, dropping out of grad school with no idea where I'd land.
And it backfired. I spent my age-25 season, as it were, in a hazy mix of shame, regret and frustration, afraid for my financial situation and for my future as a writer, which is really the only thing I've ever wanted to have.
So it came to pass that I spent the summer of 2012 too ashamed of my own mistakes (and too full of regret for decisions that I'd made not recently, but several steps back up the causal chain) to even show my face around my friends.
It was the perfect storm of my being a snotty privileged kid throwing a tantrum when things didn't go his way for once and my own abject failure to effectively fight a battle with depression that I'm still too self-conscious about to discuss publicly in any detail.
I coped in self-destructive ways. I rudely pushed away people who saw what I was going through offered to help. I spent more time than I'm comfortable admitting earnestly coming up with reasons not to take my own life.
This song, written and sung by Gaslight Anthem frontman Brian Fallon, is the theme song to the worst year I hope I ever experience. It's a beautiful song, a fairly straightforward rock track with a mellow, even rhythm guitar that steps back during the verses into a quiet, metronomic eighth-note drive by the combination of bass and palm-muted electric guitar that, when I was 15, I thought would be the foundation to every song I'd ever write.
Then, as you get to the chorus, you get a crescendo and one of my favorite drum set patterns, where you ignore the cymbals for a couple bars and just beat out progressively louder eighth notes on the snare and floor tom, arms open.
It's not a crescendo like "Stairway to Heaven" or even Nirvana's "You Know You're Right," but it gets you a chorus where it becomes perfectly clear how complete a despair Fallon's trying to communicate. It never gets above a mezzo-forte (or at least what passes for mezzo-forte for a North Jersey punk rocker), because it's not about showy, garment-rending despair. It's almost informational in its tone, as if in passing the object of the narrator's affection might like to know that he ages by years at the mention of her name.
This isn't a love song you play outside a girl's window. This is a love song you listen to alone, in the dark of your own home, sobbing into your fourteenth whiskey of the night.
Because when a line from a song resonates entirely with the only feeling you've felt for months, you want that line to be something other than: "I don't recognize myself. I'm not the man you love."
