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
Tracks 3 and 4:
***
We were driving through downtown last night, just after sunset. We were going somewhere. The sky was orange and the lights were flickering on in the skyscraper windows, and the whole thing was glittering: brakelights glittering on a packed interstate; orange sky glittering against glass; lamps glittering out warm and hopeful from their sequestered perches. It was Friday night, and the world was paused.
I’ve a sense the first song of this pair gets taken sometimes with a bit of a roll of the eyes. If you’re going to ask a deep question, the free will one’s something of a basic one to ask. But at the same time, it’s a big question, and not just theologically. Are we a product of our own decisions? Are we a product of what happens to us? To answer too heavily on the first is to deny all sorts of realities regarding the effect of one’s environment on one’s life. To answer too heavily on the second is to deny human agency, to deny human responsibility. The answer’s somewhere in the middle, but where, and when is it where?
It’s in these pauses, often, in the ones like last night, that we ask these questions. There’s some meme that goes around about it, or something like a meme, listing places that seem out of reality: airports late at night, classrooms in the summer, the movie theater parking lot dark upon exit when it was still sunlit when you entered. I-35 in downtown Austin, evidently, at least at the right time on a Friday night. It’s not necessary to ask them—in the pauses or ever—but they get asked, and we chew on them, and then, eventually, without a firm answer, we return to reality.
This pair of songs is often talked about as a question and an answer, sometimes in this harmlessly contemplative way, sometimes regarding something much darker. Spaceman is far and away the more interesting of the songs poetically, as opaque as Human is transparent, but part of the intrigue, one dimension of the glass surrounding it, comes from its place on Day & Age directly following Human. Human asks a question. Spaceman provides some kind of answer.
Flowers has said the lyric is “Storm Maker,” not “Star Maker,” which leaves our three fates as the Storm Maker, the Dream Maker, and the Spaceman. But who are they? There’s a Freudian take. There’s a trinitarian take. There’s a Rock and Roll industrial take. To my knowledge, Flowers has never spoken too directly about these three, and a lot of the discourse on the song is so focused on the easier-to-debate aspect—whether the song’s about a suicide attempt or not—that you don’t get a lot of great answers posited about this more significant piece of it. At any rate, the Spaceman gets the last word, and with that last word exhorts a call back to reality.
In the end, then, whether the plot’s about suicide or an alien abduction or getting famous or all or some or something else entirely, the takeaway is this encouragement of a sort of hesitant but optimistic existentialism, a sense that life is there to be lived, and that there doesn’t have to be more to it, but that it’s hard to rip yourself away from the more. Take this back to the facet of its existence as an answer to Human, then, and we get Flowers’s answer, which whether intended or not is an answer rather strongly on the free will side of the divide and simultaneously an answer that deflects the question—“It’s all in your mind.”
If I had to guess, I’d guess Flowers doesn’t have a clear decision himself on who’s the Storm Maker and who’s the Dream Maker and who’s the Spaceman. Id, ego, superego. Father, Holy Spirit, Son. Society, ambition, wisdom. Earth, God, self. But I don’t know. I’d love to hear him say.
Whatever his answer, the root remains the same, and that’s this encouragement to live. To participate in Earth. To look down. To get out of your head.
It was a feathery sunrise this morning, and a feathery one yesterday as well. We must have something in the sky right now—right number of cirrus clouds or something like that. And it occurs that just as sunset can pull you away from reality, out of day, into night; sunrise pulls you back into it, out of night, into day.
Out of your mind. Back into the world.
