A quick explanation:
The idea here is to make a compilation album charting the course of a particular month—September, 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. “Shotgun” – George Ezra
2. “Goodmorning” – Bleachers
3. “Fluorescent Adolescent” – Arctic Monkeys
4. “Sweet Pea” – Amos Lee
5. “Rain King” – Counting Crows
6. “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” – Bruce Springsteen
Side B
7. “All the Debts I Owe” – Caamp
8. “Lovers in Japan – Osaka Sun Mix” – Coldplay
9. “I Got You, Honey” – Ocie Elliott
10. “Tyson vs. Douglas” – The Killers
11. “Mt. Joy” – Mt. Joy
12. “Parachute” – Guster
Now. Track 11:
***
There’s always this week. This last week of September. Which, so often, becomes at its end or in its middle the first week of October. The nights are longer than the days. Baseball’s regular season is coming to its close. A chill in the air becomes more commonplace and less charmingly invigorating. It’s a border week, a week in between, a week of moving on.
Moving-on songs aren’t uncommon. Supertramp’s got a good one. Tom Petty’s got a great one. But those are so often backward-looking, warm in tone, the sound of summer ending.
This one’s different.
This one sounds like fall beginning.
It’s a colder song, Matt Quinn’s voice open and exposed up until the bridge, no rich chords or clanging metal to protect it. But it’s simultaneously not vulnerable. Or perhaps vulnerable isn’t the word. It’s confident. It’s a confident moving-on.
The song’s about two people, like many of the songs have been here on Side B, and even in a few spots on Side A. I realize we’ve gotten more concentrated in that vein as this month has gone on, and while that wasn’t a direct intention, it does mirror some of the whittling of September. September blooms like sunset, warm and inviting and more frantic than we realize. It exits like dusk, cooler and questioning, the northern hemisphere dropping slowly into a cold, long night. September opens sunny and green. It exits overcast and orange. Jeans and sweaters and a surge in hot coffee rather than iced. The first swishing leaves on the concrete. The first sight of car exhaust in months. We stay inside more. We hunker down. There’s that talk of “cuffing season,” and as basic as it might sound, there’s truth in it. Many find their love—not always a person; not always romantic; and sure, yes, this doesn’t apply to everyone—grab them, and enter the darkness together. Exposed. Open. But confident.
My brother told me a story once about a guy who met Chris Martin, the Coldplay Chris Martin, in a bar. “Bittersweet Symphony” came on, and Chris Martin turned to the guy and said something like, “This is the most beautiful song in the world.”
I don’t know if I can say that about this song.
But I’m tempted.
I could listen to the first two verses forever.
Like a mountain climber traversing a ridgeline, Quinn navigates the especially exposed second verse not crisply, but solidly, and with a humanity of some sort. And by the peak, by the, “And I open my lips to tell her she’s the anchor, I’m a sailor,” something’s been stirred. Because a definition of winter is that it’s the sea, and that it rocks us, and that we cling to something and hope to make it through, and for so many, that something is a person, and that person is an anchor. Come spring, the sea will calm, and the season will be different, and the green will come back and we’ll look up and haul the anchor in for celebration, and for easier times. But as colder days loom and the nights are now the longer of the two, “We’re lost in the height of the wave.” And there, holding on to us, is some sort of love.
I’ll admit. Though I hold a respect for David Bowie, and while I associate him with Philadelphia, just down the hills from the physical (and namesake) Mt. Joy, I know little about Ziggy Stardust, so the reference at the end loses me. But maybe that’s right, in a way. Maybe that fits. Because as we burrow, we burrow more and more alone. We lose sight of the rest of the world.
We enter with berry stains. We enter with sunlight. We exit with a storm, and with hope, and with some loneliness. We exit together with something. An isolated something. An isolated someone else.
