This Year: 2019

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

A few times in this list - most recently last week - I've said something like "I knew this band would come up, and here they are, later than I expected." I'd like to think that's because I'm still listening to new things, still ready to be impressed by both entirely new people and by the new work of people I've been following for a while.

That's probably not true, in that the comforting myths we have about ourselves are inevitably untrue. But I still like to believe it.

But this is another case: my favorite song, right now, by one of my favorite bands is from their most recent record. I could have picked a bunch of earlier songs - What Do the People Want or Wave Backwards to Massachusetts or their title song or Hassle Magnet or We Are What We Say We Are - but I didn't.

Hallelujah the Hills' 2019 I'm You is a transcendently great record. I firmly believe that. I've gone back and forth on what's the "best" song on it. But the song that's the most personal, the one I want to celebrate for 2019 is Transparent Chart of the Heavens.

It's another song that starts out quietly and gets bigger: I love those, I love the power and majesty of a band that can do that slow-burn right, that can build up the heat as they go. 

It's a catalog song: each short verse is about a specific thing. We think the singer is looking at them in turn, or thinking about them - has a question about each of them, a deep and existential question. Most of them are physical, with some personal importance, we think: first the title, then "index map of New England" and "anthology of American folk songs."

But then it changes. Next is "nostalgic dream of an old love," with the music keying up another notch higher, and what sounds like a chorus of other voices, down in the mix, behind the speaker, following along.

And then we get

Venn diagram of two people
The overlap expanding now
Venn diagram of two people
Can you be sure that I’m me, you're you, and not the other way around?

And it gets quiet again, briefly - to finally hit the chorus: Once you're born that's where it starts.

And it all comes back around to the beginning, in a lovely, overwhelming crescendo that ends the song beautifully.

What I want to leave you with is one of those questions:

How can you access feelings once felt without getting caught in its net?

I don't know. I don't know the answers to most of the questions in Transparent Chart of the Heavens. That's one of the things that makes them good questions.