Fantasies about the President dying are popping up all over the place right now, and Okkervil River frontman Will Sheff’s contribution is nothing short of genius in a genre where your options are usually polar opposites: clever allusions that are beautiful but end up ringing hollow (see Drugstore’s collab with Thom Yorke, “El President”), or ham-fisted attempts of political satire and/or revolution (See Bright Eyes’ “When the President Talks to God”).

Will Sheff avoids the pitfalls of either extreme by doing what he does best: creating a story. By narrating rather than polemicizing, Sheff crafts a message that we can all digest and take home, rather than just lunatic ranting or wondering into obscurity. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised at how dexterously Sheff handles the subject matter (the dark and gloomy world of the Black Sheep Boy is sunny compared to the political climate), but this track is remarkable for the way it moves from personal reaction to media criticism to an unabashed celebration of life itself in what feels (and sounds) like a single breath.

The acoustic opening is marked by a sense of ambivalence; the narrator of this fantastic fantasy assassination can’t rejoice, remarking that “it just seems wrong.” Awestruck at the suddenness and hyper-reality of the situation, he soon reestablishes his critical edge, accusing “the media vultures” of swarming over the dead body, devouring the truth of the situation and replacing it with positive spin. Sheff recognizes national mourning as the fiction that it is, and keenly notes that all negative opinions of the man will certainly be silenced, at least for a few days.

But rather than launching from here into a tirade, the song flashes back to earlier in the day, and in doing so reveals that this track’s actual message is one of tenderness on an extremely personal scale, which, at first glance, might appear to undermine any serious political motivation. Like “Sleeping In,” The Postal Service’s celebration of global warming, assassinations, and apathy, this story moves quickly away from politics and into personal life, where the narrator is having a really good day, a day “where the littlest things / in the littlest ways / make you feel you are blessed.”

While continuing to describe his life, his breakfast, and his surroundings, he also finally brings things back to their political roots, affirming, “I’ve got no wars to win / I don’t have a big plan.” This sort of minor jab, almost buried in the song’s continuing crescendo, is, of course, the whole point: we all matter, life is beautiful, and war is not the answer. Perfectly, the song’s celebration of the little things is its most pointed attack on “the big issues,” like our policies of war and death. When the band finally kicks in for the climax, with Sheff wailing “The President’s deeeeeeaaaaaaad,” it’s with both an honest sense of loss and a pure hope for a brighter future.

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