Track Review ⊙ Daily Ops Home
The Mountain Goats :: "Woke Up New"From Get Lonely (4AD; 2006)
“Woke Up New” is not a song about how bad it hurts to be dumped. In fact, there are no references to pain or sadness anywhere in this song. Instead we find confusion at the center of the aching knot in Darnielle’s chest. The melody skitters and hops, afraid to alight in any one place. It is not dynamic; it is restless. The uncertainty of each verse builds into the involuntary blurt of the chorus (“What do I do? / What do I do? / What do I do? / What do I do without you?”). Pain and sadness are solid and heavy and so fit neatly into the brick-in-the-face aesthetic of the Hawthorne Heights set. Confusion, which is actually much more common in moments of loss, is a trickier emotion, nebulous and terrifying. Emo doesn’t do confusion these days because you can’t set that particular type of flailing to a dance beat.
John Darnielle doesn’t lay claim to heartbreak as the exclusive privilege of an artistic soul. The guy in the song puts on a sweater and makes some coffee, acknowledging the obvious but often overlooked fact that getting your still-beating heart ripped out of your chest is a fairly pedestrian affair in the sense that it has happened to almost everyone. And when it does we don’t dye our hair black and sequester ourselves amongst our Cure posters. And this isn’t because it doesn’t suck, but because we stand on a spinning globe, and we’ve got to go to work on Monday, and we don’t work at fucking Hot Topic.
The song ends with the poor bastard standing in the middle of his street awaiting catharsis, hoping to be sad, hoping to be hurt, hoping for something he can’t exactly put his shaking finger on. But even this is not a static moment. He is expectant, “waiting for the future to arrive,” and maybe even guardedly optimistic, noting that “the world, in its cold way, started coming alive.” Pain is not a luxury reserved for emo artists; wallowing is. John Darnielle’s talent is that, feeling that pain, he muddles through it, just like the rest of us.
Eric Sams :: 5 September 2006 |
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