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 6:
***
I don’t get homesick so much as I get nostalgic. That’s the best I can sort it out, because I miss places I already am and I miss places I’ve hardly ever been. I miss an Austin on a September afternoon where there was little to do but drive. I miss a gas station off the 101 north of Santa Rosa in July where my memory claims there were rolling hills of grain flanking the road to Eureka. I do miss the changing leaves, though.
It grips me most these weeks, these still-hot weeks in Texas. It was ninety degrees and sunny yesterday, and today the air’s thick with the buggy anticipation of tonight’s cold front, one that will splash and crash its way down to highs in the low eighties this weekend. Instagram and Starbucks may overblow our infatuation with fall, but I miss a brisk air. I miss the coziness the growing darkness affords. I miss that sense of rest.
Before I dive too far in, I should note the resonance of this opening verse, and how substantially it would resonate in the more lucid moments in high school when I would look at the thing with which I was wrestling in other moments with some fear. There’s a memory of a sunny bathroom on an unseasonably hot day in fall, waiting for the chill, hearing this, hearing that first verse, and saying, “Yep.” I heard Folds sing it once, in 2015 at Fourth Pres in Chicago, the tour he did with the chamber orchestra. They played ‘Mess’ that night too. Big night for Reinhold Messner, the mountaineer who, unbeknownst for a while to Ben Folds Five, lent his name to Darren Jessee’s fake ID and thereby the band’s final album before the breakout. We should really do a Darren Jessee appreciation post sometime—he was involved in the writing on a lot of the good melancholy stuff from the band. No writer credits on this song, though.
The song is too specific in its narrative to be connected with directly. If you zoom out, though, if you blur the edges a bit, there’s this general idea, beside the homesickness, of being forced with a decision between becoming someone else and remaining who you are, and choosing the latter, or perhaps feeling it isn’t really a choice as much as a natural question and natural answer. You are you, and for the song’s character, that you belongs back home.
This resonates a bit in October, even without the line about leaves in the chorus. Summer’s long gone. Winter’s drawing near. There’s a get-home-before-dark feeling to the moment, a feeling of wanting to get somewhere to wait out the winter, a feeling of being a driver in the mountains starting to keep their eye out for an inn.
My pastor, a few weeks ago, talked about the end of a spiritual call, or phrased otherwise, the call away from a previous call. If you’d like to take the religiosity out of it, you could say something about there being different seasons in life, and different places for those seasons. Either way, it boils down to this hard issue of saying goodbye to a thing we love—a thing to which we’ve been rightly connected from which we now must rightly disconnect. The closing lines here: “I love you. Goodbye.” A place or a person or a job or a season, a thing into which we’ve poured not a piece of ourselves but a whole of ourselves, a place or a person or a job or a season which we love, but to which we must say goodbye. Of which we must let go. From which we must depart.
Perhaps the most romantic setting for this would be a hearkening to a rom-com trope, where one lover is supposed to go but they just can’t leave. The difference here, though, would be that in the end…they would go. They would leave. There would be no running off the plane to embrace outside the security line. There would be no, “turn the car around.” Sometimes, leaving is what’s right.
This is loose and conceptual and applies to little concretely, at least in my life at the moment, but I wonder, listening to the song now a sixth or a seventh straight time through, if there’s something to be learned here about saying goodbye. It’s so hard for us to do. So much strife is caused by efforts not to say it, not to do it, not to leave, not to follow the new call or follow the new season because following that call or following that season means leaving something behind that is so rich and so thick and so real and so meaningful. And I wonder if there’s a framing in this song that can help.
“All I know’s I gotta be
where my heart says I oughta be.
It often makes no sense.
In fact, I never understand these things I feel.”
It’s not always a decision. Not a conscious one, anyway. Sometimes, it’s just life’s natural progression. Sometimes, it’s not all that understandable, even to ourselves. But a goodbye must be said. Painful though it may be. We’re creatures of nature, after all.
“I love you. Goodbye.
I love you. Goodbye.”
