A quick explanation:
The idea here is to make a compilation album charting the course of a particular month—October, in this case. Part of the idea is having a good arc to it—this is why it’s an album and not a playlist; there’s a Side A and a Side B—and part of it is trying to capture the different emotions of a month in music. The biggest part, though, is that songs are a good jumping off place for writing about things that aren’t songs, at least for me. Consider this the on-site creative writing gym for The Barking Crow.
This month’s tracklist is as follows, and if you use Spotify, you can listen to it in playlist form here.
Side A
1. “Highwayman” – The Highwaymen
2. “My Oh My” – Macklemore, Ryan Lewis
3. “Human” – The Killers
4. “Spaceman” – The Killers
5. “Cover Me Up” – Jason Isbell
Side B
6. “Don’t Change Your Plans” – Ben Folds Five
7. “All My Days” – Alexi Murdoch
8. “A Dustland Fairytale” – The Killers
9. “Friday I’m in Love” – Phoebe Bridgers
10. “I Can’t Stay” – The Killers
Track 10:
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At the end of each of these months, we’ve played a moving-on song of some sort. They’ve been different, different for the months, but they’re all moving-on songs. That’s a thing you think about when you think about time. It’s its defining characteristic, in a way. It moves on. When you think of it, you think about moving on.
There’s a thing about The Killers that I, at least, have experienced in which if I haven’t listened to them in a few years and a compilation of their stuff comes on, I recognize every song that comes on but I forget it’s by The Killers. This song is the peak example of that. It doesn’t sound like their other stuff, and it isn’t like it’s part of a subgenre of their stuff that’s particularly unusual. It, itself, is just different.
The song’s more than this (it’s about being better than you were), but in a sense, it’s a going-home song, and there’s an element of that on Halloween, a big nuclear family holiday. Tomorrow, stores will fill up with Christmas supplies, and Thanksgiving will be here before we know it, but tonight, it’s a quiet night—a night to be at home. A night to go home. And even beyond Halloween, that’s kind of the thing for the end of October. We’ve talked about hunkering down, and it’s hard to describe it better than that. It’s time to hunker down. Fall’s getting to the cold part. Time is doing its thing.
We’re all moving on.
