Sunday Pages: "This Year"

A song by The Mountain Goats

Dear Reader,

I have a handful of trusted friends who hip me to new music—or, to be more accurate, music that is not new, but that managed somehow to escape my attention. A lot of good stuff escapes my attention. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a music snob. I once wrote a 4,000-word piece ranking the 50 best Billy Joel songs, for crying out loud!

One of the trusted few is my buddy Charles, who, in one of the mixes he made during one of our group CD swaps a dozen years ago, included a track called “Up the Wolves,” by alternative folk/rock outfit The Mountain Goats. It’s a mellow song, with acoustic guitars strumming, and includes this wonderful verse that leads to the allusive chorus:

There’s gonna come a day when you’ll feel better.
You’ll rise up free and easy on that day,
And float from branch to branch, lighter than the air.
Just when that day is coming, Who can say? Who can say?

Our mother has been absent
Ever since we founded Rome,
But there’s gonna be a party when the wolf comes home.

None of this makes any sense unless you are familiar, as I happen to be, with the myth of Remus and Romulus, the apocryphal twins who founded the city of Rome. Abandoned by their mother, they were left out in the elements to die, only to be saved by a she-wolf, who suckled them and raised them as her own. Images of the wolf and twins can be found on Roman coinage, and in statues in Rome.

Needless to say, this is a strange narrator—or narrators, as it were—to pick for a song released in 2005. But it works. And it connects to a larger theme: waiting hopefully for something that may never happen. Because that wolf ain’t coming back.

The Mountain Goats, as it turns out, and despite the plural, are not really a band as much one man, John Darnielle, who writes and performs all the songs. He’s written a few novels, too, so he’s clearly a literary guy—although that’s already clear from the lyrics.

“Up the Wolves” led me to the album it appears on, The Sunset Tree, which includes songs inspired by Darnielle’s high school years in Claremont, California. The song for today’s “Sunday Pages,” “This Year,” is narrated by a 17-year-old, a senior in high school. Although he’s got some things going for him—a fast car, a girl he likes, access to booze—he wants nothing more than to get the fuck out of the house where he lives with his mother and his asshole stepfather. Most of the song is the same three chords, the driving and propulsive progression simulating the pent-up energy being restrained by our disaffected narrator. It begins:

I broke free on a Saturday morning.
I put the pedal to the floor,
Headed north on Mills Avenue,
And listened to the engine roar.

The repetitive chord progression continues into the chorus, which became, for me, a sort of mantra at various points of 2020, as we all prepared for Election Day and the end of Trump’s term in office:

I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.
I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.

(It applies just as well to the quarantine period.)

He spends the day with a girl he likes, drinking Scotch. We don’t learn much about the dynamics at work, but it’s clearly a complicated relationship. The two of them are, he says, “twin high maintenance machines.”

It’s the end of the song that really gets me. The chord progression changes during a louder bridge—now he’s on his way home and preparing for the trouble he’s going to get in (is this his stepfather’s car he’s driving?).

And then comes the final verse/chorus. The rest of the song has four-line verses, with the second and fourth line rhyming. But here, at the end, Darnielle shakes it up, giving us a six-line verse, with the same rhyme scheme—and, out of nowhere, a reference to L’Shana Haba’ah, sung at the end of Passover Seder as a reminder of life in exile:

I downshifted as I pulled into the driveway,
The motor screaming out stuck in second gear.
The scene ends badly as you might imagine,
In a cavalcade of anger and fear.
There will be feasting and dancing
In Jerusalem next year.

I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.
I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.

It’s very teenager to compare one’s own hill-of-beans troubles with those of diaspora Jews, too often the targets of persecution in their adopted countries. But what resonates with me is the hopefulness of the Jerusalem line, combined with the narrator’s steely resolve and Darnielle’s unlovely but completely earnest voice. We can imagine him muttering the words to himself, to strengthen that resolve. And there’s no doubt that he will make it, that it won’t kill him.

And if he can make it, Dear Reader, so can we.

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Photo credit: Bradalmanac. The Mountain Goats at the Cat’s Cradle on the third night of the Merge25 anniversary fest. Friday, July 25th, 2014.

PS
I’m not the only one who likes this song, apparently: