This Year: 2018

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.

Here's another band I kept trying to fit in to this list - they're showing up later than I expected. I knew Okkervil River would be here somewhere, but I first thought it would have to be the brilliant, chilly, dark, overwhelming Westfall. Or maybe The War Criminal Rises and Speaks. John Allyn Smith Sails is utterly crystalline perfection, quoting an older song - I won't spoil which one, in case you haven't heard it - in a way that transforms it amazingly. It was almost Another Radio Song. Down Down the Deep River was close, too.

Maybe those songs were all too negative, too dark. It's tempting to say so. But it was probably more that those years had other songs by other people, and Okkervil River had so many choices, that I was spoiled and could keep picking through.

There are some bands where you love one song above all - and that's the one that has to get into a project like this, so you twist other things around to make it fit. Other bands are more consistent, or you love more of what they do, so you have a choice of riches. Okkervil was one of the latter; I would have been happy with any of the songs I listed above. Maybe two or three others.

Speaking of being happy, maybe that's what did it: in the end, I did go for a happier song, something more positive, as I get towards the end of this project. Well, as happy as you can get in a song called Famous Tracheotomies.

First of all, that two-word title! So much interesting tension there, so much surprise and wonder. 

A tracheotomy is a scary operation: usually done quickly to save someone's life when they can't breathe. But it's not a complicated operation, or a difficult one. It's often done in emergency situations. And you wouldn't think any of them would be famous.

This is a true story, or a collection of true stories. Singer Will Sheff had a tracheotomy as a kid, and I guess something reminded him of it many years later. The song doesn't explain why it exists; not that many songs ever do.

And I was one and a half
I was my parents' only kid
And they had lost two before that

The verses start with Sheff's personal story, and move on from there: Gary Coleman, Mary Wells, Dylan Thomas, Ray Davies. A verse or so about each - sometimes deliberately banal, always conversational, as if Sheff were riffing during a conversation.

But that banality, the matter-of-factness of it all, adds up to more as it goes. Maybe Sheff is borrowing an audience's interest in celebrity, maybe it's the shock of the operation, maybe a whole bunch of things. But it's a bittersweet, lovely, rambling song that's mostly about death and loss...until the end.

Davies had his trach fairly young, like Sheff did - not at the end, after fame, when bodies are declining and medical interventions are rising higher and higher to keep someone alive.

Ray Davies had a tracheotomy
He was at St. Thomas' Hospital in London, aged thirteen
And during his long recovery
Nurses put him in a wheelchair
And they'd wheel him out onto a balcony (on a balcony)

That's the frame: we start with a child, before everything, and we end with another. We end with a musical quote, too - almost as transcendent as the one I mentioned above in Will Allyn Smith Sails - as an iris out.

It's not a song with a single message. It's not a song that leaves the listener feeling just one emotion. It's a song about things jumbled, about good and bad together, about saving lives and losing lives. But it ends with a vision, and a reason for that "Famous" in the title - in the end, it's about the power of art to transcend pain and everyday life, about the way a song can make you happy.

Maybe even this one.