It's a great song. The music is straightforward, but necessarily so, and the lyrics are just close to perfect in tone, form and fit.
Much as I'd like to expound on the virtuosity of Brian Fallon as a lyricist, I'm not sure how much I actually *like* this song anymore. I used to listen to it all the time, but now it only comes up once every couple months because it's associated in my mind with the time in my life that I described in the post about "This Year."
Which is to say that when I spent most of my waking hours for two years thinking about killing myself, "This Year" offered a momentary reprieve from the weight that represented. But it's probably an even-money bet that if I'd actually done it, "Behold the Hurricane" is the song that would've been playing on the radio when I did.
Which seems a little weird, because "Behold the Hurricane" isn't really about problems like mine--it's a breakup song, near as I can tell, and I was something like six years removed from any breakup, almost 10 years removed from a breakup that caused me anything more than fleeting unhappiness. But there's a line in this song--"I don't recognize myself / I'm not the man you love"--that I just couldn't get away from, because that was the end result of all of the external forces that were beating me down. It wasn't about simply not liking the person I'd become, it's about being so far removed from the last version of myself that I felt good about that I can't even see the trail back to happiness anymore. I don't even know where to start.
That's why my first attempt at writing up this song was one of only two times I'd tried to write about my own struggles with depression, though putting it that way doesn't feel right. It feels antiseptic or generic, like a polite way to put something that happens to other people. Putting it that way makes it sound like a disease, which it technically is, but that's not what it feels like in the moment.
It doesn't feel medical. It feels emotional, spiritual and deeply personal. It feels like there's something intrinsically wrong, not because I'm sick on some level, but because I'm flawed, or broken. And it's particularly insidious because it forces you to hold two conflicting ideas in your mind: That you can do something about it, but you never will because you don't have the willpower to. It's like seeing a way out of a dark room, knowing you want to leave, but being unable to make the decision to open the door, day after day after day.
Well-meaning optimists would call this a "battle," which doesn't work because battles have more than one participant and progress toward an end. This doesn't. It's not as bad as it once was, but it's just how I am now, and it's how I'm going to be forever, whether I like it or not.
The song that I most associate with that feeling, so much so that it's a place that I don't like to go back to, is probably not really a "favorite." But it's up here because it's a signpost, something I was able to identify and hang on to, for better or for worse.
