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 8:
***
I was hoping for a more compelling World Series. Nothing against Atlanta or Houston, but personally, I don’t have much of a rooting interest. I was hoping to write about this song and the magic of the World Series, of elimination sports in general, of the particular drama on chilly October nights when it’s all on the line in some storied place, like Wrigley Field or Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium.
Instead, we got Houston and Atlanta. Nothing against either. It’s been a fun two games so far. But there’s no chilliness, and the stakes just don’t feel that large to me, personally. It isn’t life or death, and while sports is never actually life or death, there’s sometimes an echo. This year, there’s no echo there. For me. Personally.
This song is about life and death. It’s the story of Brandon Flowers’s parents, told while Flowers’s mom was dying of brain cancer, equal parts narrative and plea, plea for an upset, plea for the odds to be beaten. It’s the embodiment of the thing we look for an echo of in sport because in sport, it isn’t really death; in sport, it isn’t really the end. But here, too, Flowers turns to sport—specifically boxing—to express it. And it occurs to me that it’s very difficult to find a life-or-death allegory outside of the language of sport, and I wonder, perhaps, if that’s what draws us to sport in the first place. It isn’t that ultimate battle. But it’s an echo of it. And we’d prefer the echo.
