🎤
Despite my best interests I will likely be an Emo Kid for the rest of my life, and this song feels like an anthem in earnest pursuit of that ideal.
This track comes from lasts year‘s “152”, the proper album since their genuinely solid 2016 album Tidal Wave (although throughout the past few years they’ve done an excellent job pushing out 20 year anniversary collections and unearthing demos to really accentuate how fucking old we’ve all gotten). With that in mind, this track really hones in on this concept of aging — hopefully gracefully — while holding onto whatever spark in your life that keeps you going. The production sounds tight and anthemic on a level not quite like the noise and angst of their old songs but hey, that’s what two decades does to a mf.
As i stumble into my 30s and perpetually see the sentiment that anyone born before 1995 should start collecting Social Security, I cannot help but resonate with this song. the subtle contrast between Lazarra’s pronunciation of “S’old” really drives this home; we refuse to admit it but we really do discard the Old for the New. It’s one of their simpler choruses, yet it says so much as the phrase shifts its context with each repetition of the phrase.
it feels honest about the passage of time yet optimistic about how that shouldn’t keep you from what makes you happy. I can’t help but sing this from the top of my lungs on every listen, even as i feel my body slowly become brittle and fatigued. But I’ll still sing.
After all,
We’re gonna get so old, either way.
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Inspired by 80‘s production, this song feels bigger than itself. End credits of a movie vibe. Reflective of passing youth. In layered, reverb laden vocals he sings “Growing up is never easy…Wrong enough to say I’m sorry. Owning up to things I can’t undo.” It’s great for a drive alone thinking on all the things that’ve passed you by and all that has yet to arrive :)
May 4, 2024
Specifically "Canola Fields" by James McMurtry. I feel like the older I get, the more this sort of songwriting resonates. It's impossible to escape. Even if you're not a dad yet, the dad rock finds you. Be warned.
Anyway, one of the lines is so simple, yet poignant, and, to me, that's the true hallmark of good songwriting. The line: "cashing in on a thirty year crush, you can't be young and do that". It reorients aging in a way that really struck me. Smashing together the childish and the mature and flipping the usual loss/gain calculus. Showing that just as there are certain things unrecoverable to the old (that humming freshness of youth!), there are also things that are incomprehensible to the young. It's a dialectic, and romance and beauty come in many forms.
Mar 4, 2024
Ok I know I’m hella late to this because I feel like everyone already knows this song but I discovered it from a tumblr post of the lyrics and I was so moved by them that I had to listen to it. I’d always been kinda anti-The Zombies because annoying people I went to high school with really like them and after listening to the rest of this album I do feel kinda vindicated in that (soz). BUT this song is so good and I can already tell it will become an all-timer for me. I love it because it’s a love song that also can read as being about other things and it’s so hopeful and full of yearning and uncertainty. Also the piano part at the beginning reminds me a lot of “Praise You” by Fatboy Slim. It’s the perfect mix of great lyricism and just enough 60s psychedelic pop.
Jan 14, 2025
