September, Track 2: Goodmorning

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 2:

***

Jack Antonoff has said of this song, “It’s really about waking up with all your baggage and then picking it up and going through the day,” something rather physically expressed in the song’s opening lines:

Woke up, I’m in the in-between, honey.
One foot out, and I know the weight is coming.
Because I left it by the bed last night.

In the case of the song, the baggage seems to be guilt—guilt compounded by unearned exoneration offered in the second verse.

There are strains these days, societally it seems, in which the thing to do with guilt is to deny its validity. The example that comes most loudly to mind is an episode at my mom’s church where, when a new pastor tried to bring back a prayer of confession to the weekly service (nothing personal, mind you—a short prayer in unison with a few seconds of silence for reflection in the midst) and the congregation pushed back, demanding its removal, demanding to not be prompted to directly experience their guilt.

It’s not always that direct, of course. A lot of times it manifests in an unwillingness to admit wrongness, or the self-justification when there is only poor justification to be found, or no justification at all. Sometimes, guilt’s treated as a weapon people always impose on others, and while manipulation certainly tries, often, to elicit and turn upon guilt (the “guilt trip”), and guilt has been institutionally weaponized at times, this is a narrow picture of what guilt is. Guilt, processed well, is a healthy thing to feel. It’s a reasonable thing to feel. We make mistakes. We regret those mistakes. When those mistakes hurt others, guilt is the natural response.

My favorite thing about Goodmorning is Antonoff capturing the disappointed exasperation of this sort of guilt:

How come I lied to you?
I lied to you.
I lied to your face in the summer.
You had long hair then…

One of the many painful parts of guilt is not understanding why we’ve sinned. Why did we hurt another? Why did we lie to them? Why did we lie to their face in the summer?

September could be called a month of Saturdays. You could make that case. You could say there’s a sense of timelessness, an absence of pressure. You could even specify that they’re sunny Saturdays. Saturdays where you wake up in a fog, and you walk outside, and there’s fresh air and you don’t have to be somewhere anytime fast so you just feel the fresh air, and all that accompanies it.

Sometimes, “all that accompanies it” includes a little bit of guilt.