This is the shortest song in the top 100, at two minutes and three seconds, and the last one--until, ironically enough, the No. 1 song overall--that doesn't have a complicated musical or personal reason for me to like it so much.
It's also one of the least The National songs in The National's entire oeuvre.
Come to think of it, why isn't "Mr. November" at least somewhere on this top 100? It's because in my mind people like it for the same reason they like Buckcherry's "Crazy Bit*h," which is to say that the chorus is an excuse to shout "fuck" out loud in a group of people, which might not be fair and also I don't need an excuse to do that because I'm an Eagles fan so maybe I never identified with that urge, but it was definitely a thing when I was about 21, which was--bizarrely--the time in my life when I heard The National and Buckcherry both in public the most. And also, we're all adults here--I mean, clearly we're not, because we're listening to Buckcherry--can't we just spell out "bitch" instead of putting the asterisk there? And if not, doesn't it make way more sense to asterisk out the i instead of the c?
These are things I think about.
"Fashion Coat" is, like, peppy, which is weird as hell for a The National song. It's got a groovy bass line and an upbeat organ part and a lot of the trappings of power pop. But on top of that OK Go- or Fountains of Wayne-ish music lies the usual heavy dollop of despair and loneliness, the juxtaposition of which is a thing I've always enjoyed.
It's got memorable lines--"Everywhere I am is just another thing without you in it"--and beautiful, fun harmonies splattered around the song wantonly like a child's cooking experiment. The harmonies give an additional sense of motion to a song that didn't really need it to begin with, and provide the last flourish to a song that's practically unique within The National's CV.
