Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 170: Zach

Prompt: "A song about..... um, I don't know. You tell me. Pick something funny that should have been included in this prompt. 'A song about ____.' Make it a good one."

Zach's Prompt: "A song that other YSC contributors redeemed for you, then ruined for you, then redeemed for you again, and meanwhile you hadn't even realized you were doing a whole internal monologue in your head that you thought had to do with the other contributors but then you know thanks to years of therapy that it just had everything to do with you and your own shit and you just have to keep trying to confront your own dark turmoil and doesn't that mean you're still hopelessly codependent and maybe you should talk about that with your therapist too but you're not going to because this week you'll just talk about your new girlfriend for one full hour and blow $140 and realize you could have spent that money at a Stephen Starr restaurant but then you realize you haven't heard about Stephen Starr for at least a decade and does he even still have restaurants in Philadelphia and the only reason you're even bringing him up is because you know all the YSC contributors will know who he is and therefore they'll get excited that you brought him up and you'll make them happy and by making them happy you'll be happy yourself and isn't that just your codependence rearing its head again and you realize it's hopeless, your situation, but it's not, you just have to pay for more therapy and switch therapists and maybe if you do that your hair will stop going gray and you'll live to 100 and see your great-grandchildren be born and isn't that the entire point of life anyways?"

"Cardinal"

Kacey Musgraves

Deeper Well, 2024

I listened to a lot of Kacey Musgraves this year, pretty much exclusively thanks to her being mentioned on YSC. Sara was the first to clue me in to her with the best song / worst song on your favorite album prompt. Maeve's made a mention or two of Kacey. We all reviewed her album on RC around the time I learned about her. All this activity around this March embedded her music into my consciousness at a specific and annoying but ultimately hopefully less important period of my life—when I was moving into a new apartment with a roommate with a stick up his ass and an abrasive personality, when it became abundantly clear that the person I was dating was a total flake and an unreliable communicator, when I was sleeping on an air mattress, when the glass door at my friend's apartment inexplicably had shattered when I came home one day and one of the two cats I was watching there has since been missing and still hasn't come back nine months later, when I got a piece of glass stuck in my foot (and it stayed there for a month and a half), when I started to get nervous about my upcoming birthday, when I was stressing about packing up my entire old apartment by the end of the month (it was full of items that weren't mine), and so on and so forth. It was a hard time, but I listened to Kacey Musgraves during that time, and I learned about a new artist I actually liked. Did it make the time period easier? I don't know. But it did add a nice color to a time that, otherwise, felt unstable and oh god why do I need to end paragraphs so neatly, can't I just be insane and get spiritually electrocuted and have my hair go on fire and not really care what point I'm making and how that affects what other people think, why is this prompt so perfect for me?

So thank you to Sara, Maeve, Nate (for picking the basic-ass song I needed), and, really, also to Brianna, Bridget, Gilson, Sunny, Allison, and Joe for picking Deeper Well for RC through popular vote (just gonna assume we all voted, why sweat the details?) and of course not everyone voted so why am I even thanking everyone and I'm not name dropping everyone here because I'm codependent. I swear, but of course that's the main reason I'm doing it please just please tell me you love me, oh pretty please, over and over again, that's the good stuff, ahhhhhhhhhh and that's the good stuff, that's the fuel I need to get through the day and this week and this year and maybe my entire life?

Joe, in his abundant humility, would never assume that one of his creative initiatives (in this case, YSC) unquestionably changed someone's musical choices, and, therefore, someone's life, and even if he did, he would never put it out there in public. But I'm here to say that this creative initiative has had a real effect on my music listening this year (and probably for the rest of my life). Sometimes we need other people to say the true things about us that we'd never say about ourselves and you LOVE that sentence, Zach, don't you, you love reading your own writing, isn't it just so good, isn't it so genius, you're such a good writer, the whole world needs to know your talent, shut up, you're nothing, the whole world isn't seeing your writing and there must be a reason for that because maybe it's just not good enough and your poem got rejected from Fahmidian Journal this week because they don't want to read about your Arab Friend and maybe you'll never get published and you'll die alone.

This song feels like March 2024 to me. The slightly warmer air, longer sunlight, a different smell in the air. And stress. Lots of stress. That's fine. It's OK for songs to remind us of the mediocre times too no nothing is OK, everything is wrong and the world is upside down and we pretend like we're normal and neat and we button up our shirts like everyone else but inside we are just animals waiting to be released but we can't release ourselves because we need paychecks and bathrooms and healthy food and we've lost the hunter-gatherer in us and if the black bears of the eastern United States decided to rise up against us we won't be able to fight them because we're too busy talking about how the world makes us feel on Zoom to our therapists and we're just striving to stay alive until we hit a full century but the bears will kill us all anyway or maybe it'll be some new Gestapo we didn't know about until now and none of those hours and money spent on self-love will matter at all.