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 12:
***
Well. Here it is. The end of September. The twilight of the year. The shift to orange and grey.
I don’t remember when I first came across this song—I listened to Guster for a while before finding this, by Guster—but I listened to it a lot my senior year of college. I’d often not go to the trouble of opening the blinds on the ground floor of the townhouse, and it was a rather dark space anyway, so I have these memories of sitting in a half-furnished open room, floor descending in the corner to some sort of gully in the foundation, oven installed too close to the wall and gouging deeper and deeper every time we opened it, ants coming through from the place next door but held off by a line of salt, me listening to Guster. Specifically, listening to “Parachute.”
They’re happy memories. It’s a happy song, I think. It’s happy to me.
It’s come up a few times, this song. In recesses of the internet, in a quiet winter conversation with a friend. The friend lit up when I mentioned it. I lit up when he lit up. There seems to be something mystical about this song—an element of the sort of cult following often reserved for a band itself. You find the song on YouTube or on one of those song-meanings sites and people have all these personal stories about it. And yet nobody seems to really know what it means. It’s about some sort of leap, sure, about uncertainty, about diving in, but what’s the parachute? Who’s the parachute? Is there a parachute? Something about the tone makes it feel hopeful. Things from the tone and the text make it feel liberative. And for some reason, at least to me, it’s not an opening-scene song. It’s a song for when the credits roll.
You can take a leap at any time in the year. You do take leaps at any time in the year. But there’s an isolation at the end of September, a feeling where the world’s whizzing by but you’re still, like you’re standing beside the freeway. There’s a pause, if you find it: A look back at the summer, a look back at the year, and then…a leap. If you want it to be a leap. It could be a step, too. It could be as simple as merging back onto that freeway. But now and then, it’s a leap.
There’s so much time left. A quarter of the year. There are months ahead before New Year’s and months after that until spring, and even then at least weeks before summer dawns again. There is time.
I think of a blacksmith, working on a bitter evening, skin chapped and burned, arms and wrists and fingers aching. I think of that faint final glow of sunset outside, and of the many who have gone home or are going home, but there is the blacksmith, still working. Still pounding. Still shaping. Doing the work for the day. We’re not there yet in the year. But tomorrow, we might be. Tomorrow, it’s October. Tomorrow, there’s no longer a quarter of the year left. Tomorrow, the air is that little bit cooler, and here in Austin the city will surge and fade with the first weekend of the music festival, the music festival that heralds the arrival of autumn to Central Texas, the first time when it’s believable again that the air could be cool.
I think of Malibu, of all places, that stretch of the 1 just north of Los Angeles, and of driving up through it five years ago, leaving Southern California, bound for foggy reaches before I made it to San Luis Obispo for the night. There had been people playing volleyball on the beach back by Santa Monica. There were people camping on beaches to come, where the cars slowed down. But I was alone. I was traveling. I was bound for foggy reaches.
There’s something grounding in a pause, and especially in a pause where things still move around you. It’s a good place from which to leap.
“Know the place I’m leaving—and the rest just is gone.”
