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 5:
***
I may be committing some malpractice here. I’ve never read Henderson the Rain King. But I’ve heard the Adam Duritz line from Storytellers—the one about Henderson bleeding his emotions over everyone and everything, and how that felt, to Duritz, a lot like a description of writing: the emotions that drove him to write with their pressure building and building until he sprayed it all out there; and then, too, the Henderson-adjacent feeling Duritz had at the time of not having become what he should be.
You could call September the month in which a place is most itself. You could say this of any month, I suppose, but I’d say it about September. It’s the less volatile of the equinoxes. The freneticism brought on by endings is lacking. The world of school makes it a month in which families are in their place of living, unlike comparably pleasant months used more for vacation. At some point, the newness of the post-Labor Day changes wears off, and you settle in, and the place becomes itself in its closest form.
This song has that effect for me.
This song, for me, is where I’m closest to myself.
It’s not the Henderson part, or the Rain King part (though upon reflection, I do identify with all of that: being driven by emotion into the sea of pens; being driven by emotion to this poetic, examinative encounter with death; feeling the frustration of seeing where I think I should be with my work and being both not there and feeling a sense of the target withering for lack of oxygen as I despair back across the gap). It’s the sound of it.
I collided hard with Counting Crows in fifth grade. I think it was a Christmas gift from my oldest brother. Films About Ghosts. The greatest hits album. It was still a CD age, and I’d put the CD in my boombox and listen to it while getting ready in the morning, while working on homework after school, while showering again at night. I’d let it cycle through, Track 1 to Track 17 to Track 1 again. And again. And again. And again. I came to know each song intimately, and not just the songs but their place in the album. I hear the end of “Angels of the Silences” and I still, today, wait for that low, slow introduction to “Round Here.” I hear “Einstein on the Beach” and I wait for “Anna Begins” to begin.
Rain King was the third track on that CD. It was my favorite song, and in a different way from future favorite songs. Future favorite songs of mine revolved so much around lyricism, something that’s gotten to a point where I can’t quit it. But at ten, I was not yet deep into Song Meanings comment sections, and I was far from taking any sort of legitimate English class, and I was still rather firmly in childhood, still rather firmly in a relatively carefree time. I liked the song because I liked how it sounded. I didn’t care much what it said.
So, while there’s much about the words there, it’s still more about the sound for me. The blossoming electric guitars. The soaring descent through the verses, a rollercoaster melody dropping and bouncing and dropping again. And even with the words, the sound of them. “Deliver me in a black-winged bird.”
September is a month of, in many ways, coming home. Coming home to the most basic version of one’s life. The most routine version. The most consistent version. Not coming home to rest, like in December, but coming home to live.
This is a song I come home to.
