Eight Long Goodbyes, part 1

"It sorta starts off real slow and then fizzles out altogether." Neil Young said that on the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young live album 4 Way Street, introducing the song “Don’t Let It Bring You Down.” The version of that song on that record is three minutes and thirty seconds long. You’d have to be a goldfish to have such a short attention span that you'd feel compelled to check your tiny goldfish watch during "Don't Let It Bring You Down." Maybe the watch would die the second you brought it into your fish tank because it was not waterproof, and you'd have to deal with the shame of an existence where even trying to quantify your boredom led to more boredom, a boredom impervious to anything at your disposal. Maybe it would be a "Ca-sea-o" watch.

High five me. High five your screen right now. I deserve it. "Ca-sea-oh." Push your hand into your computer monitor until the monitor falls over.

I love a song that starts off real slow and then fizzles out altogether, especially if comes at the end of a record and nothing is there to follow the fizzle, a long goodbye that slowly acclimates me to real life, if I have the patience to let it.

This is different from an epic last track. I love The Dismemberment Plan's "Respect Is Due," a 12 minute slow burn that starts with murmurs and ends in a throat-shredding yell, and comes at the end of an album whose second-longest song is 5 minutes long. I love the way "Respect Is Due" builds and builds and then abruptly ends, which always gives me a second to catch my breath before choosing a new album to hear. The thing I'm talking about is sometimes not even a song. Sometimes the thing I'm talking about is:

1. "Nowhere Road, Georgia, February 21, 2005" by Phosphorescent, which ends the album Aw Come Aw Wry
   
   I was going to finish and publish this post on February 21, 2025, twenty years from when Phosphorescent's constant core Matthew Houck made this field recording, but then my coworker died and I was thrown off for a bit. Here we are now, though, "Nowhere Road, Georgia, February 21, 2005."
   
   "Nowhere Road" is the sound of a thunder storm and it lasts nearly 19 minutes. It isn't the final song on Aw Come Aw Wry, if you differentiate a field recording from a song. That would be "Endless," a two-parter, divided into two tracks, whose first piece is a simple folk song and whose second piece is an emotionally overwhelming (to me, at least) piece where an unknowable number of voices sing the melody from "Endless, Pt. 1," first accompanied by instrumentals and then fully a capella before ending with a piano rendition of the theme that's recurred a half-dozen times across the album's preceding songs.
   
   "Endless, Pt. 1" ends with the lyric
   
   "And your ghost
   fills my sight
   and the gathering light
   is laying soft around your feet,
   As you turn to ask of me,
   'Is it long, my love, until we rest?'
   Endless."
   
   and that transitions seamlessly into "Endless, Pt. 2," which transitions seamlessly into "Nowhere Road"
   
   I don't know why Houck ended his album with 19 minutes of distant rain sounds, but I've always appreciated it. To me, it's sometimes a way of pretending the album is as endless as the journey Houck describes in "Endless, Pt. 1." There will be no life-affirming axiom to guide us directly to rest, just a lot of time to figure out what rest looks like. You can turn Aw Come Aw Wry off whenever you want during "Nowhere Road" but the track will still be going, just like "The Song That Doesn't End."
   
   Houck was born in Huntsville, Alabama and was living in Athens, Georgia when he made Aw Come Aw Wry, his second album, and there's an actual Nowhere Road that intersects with a Nowhere Lane in Hull, right outside of Athens. The field recording is almost like the author photo in the back of a book: You've experienced the work, now here's a look, stripped of any artistic ornamentation, at who made it.
2. "Pride" by Phosphorescent, which ends the album Pride
   
   Until his most recent record, Houck ended all of his studio LPs in notable ways. Muchacho and C'est La Vie are each bookended by complementing songs, Here's To Taking It Easy ends with a 9 minute epic last track that features a long, winding instrumental passage as relevant to the song's themes as any of the actual lyrics and both sides of A Hundred Times or More close with two-parters similar to what he'd later do with Aw Come Aw Wry's "Endless."
   
   After the long, near-silence that closed Aw Come Aw Wry, Houck ended his next album with "Pride," a title track you'd struggle to actually call a song. Like Aw Come Aw Wry, Pride features a devastating song and then space.
   
   In Pride, the song is "Cocaine Lights," a piece about the slow comedown after a drug binge that was supposed to deliver its singer closure, or happiness or at least distance from heartache. The debauchery, which has already finished by the time the song starts, is the similar "putting on a happy face" that happens in the "Nothing Compares 2 U" lyric "Since you been gone I can do whatever I want / I can see whomever I choose."
   
   "Cocaine Lights" ends with a beautiful piece of writing:
   
   "In the darkness,
   after the cocaine lights,
   I will miss you
   with no warning.
   
   "I will recover my sense of grace,
   and rediscover my rightful place,
   yes, and cover my face
   with the morning."
   
   "Cocaine Lights then gradually loses its structure and, by the time it's segued into "Pride," is an asynchronous blob of piano tinklings and Houck's overdubbed snaps, yelps and howls, though with less energy than "yelps" or "howls" might imply. I might listen to "Nowhere Road" on its own, but I'd never do that with "Pride," which does not mean "Pride" isn't exactly what its album needed, thematically. The key to "Pride" is, to me, the verse before what I just quoted. It goes
   
   "And lord, truly I am awake
   and lord, truly I am afraid
   and lord, truly I remain."
   
   "Pride" is about remaining. It's the last bit of fucking around and then the time it takes to force oneself out of bed to do the work. And it doesn't sound like the work is going to happen anytime soon. "Pride" is just existing, where I think "Nowhere Road" is part of a search. It's as close to the sound of a hangover as I've heard this side of Arab Strap's "I Would've Liked Me A Lot Last Night."
   
   I know, either because life has to continue or because Phosphorescent continued to release albums and kept breaking through to bigger audiences, that things got better, and that's why I can listen to "Cocaine Lights" and "Pride" without feeling destroyed. The saddest songs aren't the ones about being sad, they're the ones about having been sad so long there may not be anything left but to remain.
3. "Marais la Nuit" by Neko Case, which ends the album Middle Cyclone
   
   "Marais la Nuit," which translates to "Marsh at Night," serves almost the same purpose as Phosphorescent's "Nowhere Road" and ends its record four years after "Nowhere Road" ended its own. "Marais" was recorded at Neko Case's Vermont Farm and is relatively lively, a field recording with bugs buzzing and frogs croaking. On CD, it's over 31 minutes long and on vinyl it's a tight 15 minutes, and that's a negligible difference, though it's worth noting that Middle Cyclone is a double LP and "Marais" takes up all of Side D, meaning the CD version slips from previous song "Red Tide" into the marsh, where the vinyl listener has to actively choose to hear "Marais." The introduction of intention always changes everything.
   
   This matters because, while Middle Cyclone, with its Sparks and Harry Nilsson covers, is a less cohesive record than Aw Come Aw Wry, and a marsh is not a rainy city on a sound, "Marais" feels connected to "Red Tide" in the same way "Endless" does to "Nowhere Road." Case's "Red Tide" is about the rush of familiarity she feels when revisiting Tacoma, Washington, where she grew up. The ambient gravel, tree and gasoline smells we'd all take for granted viscerally shock Case, this total gut punch that brings on specific memories that weren't buried because they were traumatic but because they were so banal. It's just "This is what it used to feel like to be in my body." I've felt the same thing revisiting an old elementary school or reading something especially earnest I wrote as a kid.
   
   Case ends "Red Tide" with the verse
   
   "I want to go back and die at the drive-in,
   die before strangers can say,
   'I hate the rain,
   I hate the rain.'"
   
   I can't unpack everything here and I don't want to mind read and assume Case's intentions. I'll say my grandmother grew up in Tacoma and was still visiting increasingly smaller school reunions a few years before she died and I lived in Seattle for college from 2007-2009. I didn't hate the rain, but I hated those gray skies. It was not the place for me, largely due to my own failings. I'm not a child and I'm not going to blame a city for my depression.
   
   By 2007, though, the SeaTac area was not the place my grandmother was raised in. Amazon had been headquartered in Seattle for a decade, Microsoft was 15 miles away and tech had changed the kind of person who could even afford a home up there. Tacoma, once the blue-collar sister city to Seattle, was for some people the place to buy a house in and then commute away from, a bedroom community for plenty of outsiders who'd moved for work and proceeded to piss and moan about the weather so many locals were perfectly happy with.
   
   "Marais" meant one thing when I thought it was recorded in Tacoma and it means different things now. Then, it was an artist reveling in her first hometown. 'Go ahead and hate the rain. Better yet, leave. I love it so much I'm going to sit with it for 30 minutes after a 40 minute album.' It was partly proud and partly defiant.
   
   I don't know if Case still lives on the farm in Vermont where she recorded "Marais," but now that I know the field recording was made on the other side of the country from Tacoma, it sounds like the work of a person comfortable with where they are. Maybe it means Case embraces her current (or then-current) hometown and that she wouldn't want nature to adapt to her presence. Whatever the meaning, I hear "Marais" as a commitment to a place. It feels inviting: 'Listen to how great it is out here and think about what that means to me.'
   
   When I listen to all 31 minutes of "Marais la Nuit," which is not often or even every time I listen to the rest of Middle Cyclone in full, it gives me time to think, and I always appreciate that. It, like "Nowhere Road," operates as the end credits of a movie sometimes do, as a liminal space to reflect on what I've just experienced. That time between the traditional end of an album and the beginning of whatever's next wouldn't mean much if Houck and Case weren't incredible writers; there's no need to sit with the themes of a Weezer or Mac DeMarco record after hearing their insights into feeling happy but then other times feeling sad and maybe even bored.
4. "Lawn & So On" by Grandaddy, which ends the album Under The Western Freeway
   
   More semi-silence from the edge, "Lawn & So On" is, as the preceding long goodbyes have been, a direct continuation of its preceding track, though there's more going on here. The song follows "Why Took Your Advice," a lonely song about disconnection with lyrics like
   
   "I took your advice
   and bought a microscope
   but I can't find anything
   I'd want to see up close"
   
   and ends with the repeated line "How come you never call?" That could be an entitled question, and maybe it looks that way on paper, but Grandaddy's Jason Lytle, great at many things, is especially good at expressing the gap between what he has and what he was working toward without coming off self-pitying. Even when singing about being fed up with his environment, it usually sounds like Lytle's fix is to shrug and wander into the wilderness. I don't think he's lashing out at anybody in "Why Took Your Advice" as much as he's genuinely asking why things didn't work out. This transitions to "Lawn & So On" and a beautiful little arpeggio and a swell from the full band, where the previous song or two had sounded like Lytle alone. With the way Grandaddy worked, it's possible "Lawn & So On" is also Lytle alone, layering different instrumental pieces on top of each other until it sounds like he's with his four bandmates, though in this case, the method and the illusion would produce the same effect.
   
   After a couple minutes, the music peters out, Lytle leans into the mic and says "Sorry. Not sorry," which in 1997 was not the overused hashtag it is today, but a self-conscious musician giving himself an out and then taking it away, deciding to stick to the art he's just finished. A little studio sound follows, maybe turning off instruments and standing up from a piano bench, because Grandaddy albums always sound like they come from a real place, and then five or six minutes of a field recording of crickets.
   
   In my mind, at least, it's movement from the Modesto, California barn where Grandaddy recorded their music to the surrounding field. "Lawn" is less specifically titled than "Nowhere Road," but, again, it's a concrete place. There are a few points in Under The Western Freeway where Grandaddy hint at the technophobia (probably too broad a term for the nuance they bring to the topic) to come in their second studio LP, The Sophtware Slump. That album is much more focused on homesick space miners, alcoholic robots and broken household appliance national forests, but Western Freeway has songs like "Go Progress Chrome," a song that sees Lytle bemoan a plan to "paint the moon some brand new future color." Lytle's dystopias are always effective because they're set in the present and their central metaphors are relatable in their split between the silly and the sad, and because he offers relief; the homesick miner gets to look at his home from space, the robot expresses itself through a poem, nature takes back all the broken household appliances in the forest as owls and deer use the mess for shelter.
   
   Whatever happens with space, robots, other people, everything, this lawn will be right here.
   
   In his poem "Self-Portrait at 28," David Berman writes
   
   "It is a certain hill.
   The one I imagine when I hear the word 'hill,'
   and if the apocalypse turns out
   to be a world-wide nervous breakdown,
   if our five billion minds collapse at once,
   well I’d call that a surprise ending
   and this hill would still be beautiful,
   a place I wouldn’t mind dying
   alone or with you."
   
   and that is how I picture Jason Lytle's lawn, and that is a place to end an album on.