Better Things: The Exploding People

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

When I write these posts, I need to turn off whatever music I have already playing, dig up a YouTube link for the song I'm featuring, and get myself into the right mindset.

This time, though, I already have some Cloud Cult playing - their 2022 record Metamorphosis - so I might let it run for a bit as I type here. It probably makes no difference on your end. It's not a thing you would even notice.

Cloud Cult is the most positive band I know. Even better, it's not the flabby usual American positivity, it's a tough, muscular positivity, the kind that fights through jungles to get to that point, the kind that insists that it is going to be positive, no matter what, because it has to. Because the alternative is unthinkable.

There are a few other songs I almost picked - When Water Comes To Life still strikes me as their essential song, the one about why that attitude matters and what the singer went through (and I hate to say it, but I'm slightly tearing up just thinking about that song), and 1x1x1 is compelling and stark and brilliant.

But most of my favorite songs of theirs are from their wonderful 2010 record Light Chasers, which is something like a SF concept record. (Not a whole lot like, I guess, but something like.) And, so, today, I want to feature The Exploding People.

Can't escape from yourself unless you don't run.

That's the Zen koan at the middle I keep coming back to, the triple negative. A lot of Cloud Cult is about that big question: how do you live your life? Again, it's not coming from a place of authority, but one of vulnerability, a voice saying "I keep doing this thing that hurts and I need to stop."

This is a song about death, I think.

You never see the present, cuz you're always looking back.
Or counting down the seconds to your heart attack.
Bottle it up, and the bottle goes crack.
Do what you do, cuz you can't come back.
And one by one, the people, they explode.

About death in the sense that we all will die, everyone will die, and every moment you have not dead is a moment to use, to live in, to be alive in.

All the best Cloud Cult songs are like that: muscular, energetic, complex tangles of emotion about the big things that are also the personal things, and about failure at those things more than success. About how the singer wants to live, wants to be: what he keeps telling himself in hopes he can actually get there. I appreciate that a hell of a lot. Some days I need it more than others.