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 9:
***
I was at a wedding a couple months ago where the couple walked down the aisle to this. Not up the aisle—they didn’t exit to it. They entered to it.
I’ve never seen a processional that perfect. Most wedding processionals are perfect, but this was something more, like McDonald’s Coke compared to all the other fountain Cokes, a kind of perfect that changes the definition of the word, making it somehow gradient instead of binary. The song played, and they walked down the aisle, and the room was warm and softly bubbling and there was joy and wonder, two things which very much belong at a wedding but seemed original to this wedding, somehow, again, like McDonald’s Coke.
In college, I was part of an a cappella group, one of those obnoxious pop ones where the guys wear ties for the performances and make bad jokes geared towards moms but tell themselves they’re cool, and maybe in some settings they are cool, but even if they’re cool they’re being cool while often doing an uncool thing (we were a mix of cool and uncool, but I was decidedly on the uncool side, so since I also wasn’t much help musically, I left after two years). The thing I liked most about that experience was, of all things, the arrangements, and specifically the arrangements where rather than imitating a song or watering a song down or vanilla-ing a song into something twelve white dudes could sing without instruments, whoever was doing the arranging found a way to make the song better. They didn’t just take the song and do it better, either. They took the song and transformed it, stripping things away or adding things until the song wasn’t immediately recognizable. They found a better song inside the original, then went and carved it out. A University of Michigan group did this with Skinny Love. I like to think we did it with Chandelier.
It’s hard, covering a song and making it better than the original, and it should be stressed that this isn’t to disparage the original songs—Skinny Love, Chandelier (I should confess Sara Bareilles did most of the work; we built upon her transformation of it), Friday I’m in Love. All are great songs in their own right. They aren’t shipwrecks to be salvaged. They’re sculptures with better sculptures within them, better sculptures that bear echoes of their humble originals, giving that reaction which isn’t just, “Wow, this is a great song,” but, “Wow, this is a great song, and…it’s that other song, originally?” It might be more impressive to craft a beautiful song from scratch, but it’s more striking to find one this way.
I’ll spare the words so many have already said about this song’s beauty and just say that I love it. That it’s beautiful. And that it grasps well one of the best feelings of Friday after work or class, or of any day when there’s a moment of rest between two kinds of responsibilities, or between responsibility and recreation—a feeling like that of noticing the sky when one hasn’t noticed the sky in some while. I had one of those Fridays this weekend. I noticed the sky. The day had gone haywire—our dog’s daycare (you try working from home with a 65-pound puppy) had a leak and had to cancel, meaning my wife had to extend her commute by an hour and I had to cut two or three hours out of my workday, all before leaving to fly to Kentucky for a wedding yesterday. I’d hoped to get this written and posted with Friday’s batch of content. Instead, I had the kind of Friday it embodies. I did the minimum for work. I checked that there were no lurking urgencies. And then, around lunchtime, I went outside with Fargo, and she grabbed the biggest branch she could find and when she couldn’t figure out how to navigate it between our house and a tree, she broke off a stick from its side and brought it to one of her spots to chew, and I stood there next to the enormous, gnawing puppy and looked at the sky. It was in the 70’s in Austin. There was a stiff breeze. The sunlight was radiant and the leaves were green and the sky was blue, and there were all sorts of things to get done, but none needed to be done just yet. I was between responsibilities. The world, for a moment, paused.
I don’t know if October offers the most of these Fridays, but I think it’s possible it does. It’s not summer, so Friday means something. It’s not spring or September, so there isn’t the hectic race to go enjoy something. It’s not the holiday season, when there are all sorts of charming things to be done. It’s not winter, when joy and wonder are replaced, at Friday’s best, with a cozy comfort. By process of elimination, I think it might be October.
So, I guess, hats off to Friday, two days late. And hats off to Phoebe Bridgers, for finding this David in the midst of an already-great block of marble. And to my friends on their wedding, where they found whatever the syrup/soda ratio is with McDonald’s Coke.
