Month 2: Bright Eyes - At The Bottom of Everything

It's May 19, 2020, and it has been two months since I started this song-diary-cum-blog-cum-something-I'll-think-of-later. It's day 58 of the UK-wide lockdown, though we're now staying alert rather than staying home and I'm pretty sure I saw eight guys who weren't part of the same family playing basketball in the park yesterday, which doesn't seem right.

Today's post comes from you in the middle of my final exam week, which is a strange time to be writing a daily blog. Honestly, though exams are still a gigantic fart in an elevator, I'm mildly grateful that something is happening to make a week feel different at all. Next month will come to you from the endless morass of post-degree-in-a-pandemic uncertainty, and while I look forward to watching nothing but Star Wars: The Clone Wars all day along, I don't look forward to that bit.

It's at this point that I should point out that my degree ends in three days. It's kind of a whole thing, you see. While I do look forward to my in-person graduation in December 2021, this is broadly it, and that's kind of weird. Everything changes, and yet everything stays the same. After this, I'll still be in my bedroom that's not my childhood one because I moved into my brother's bigger room when he moved out even though he's been back now for two months and is living in my smaller bedroom, and I'll still be watching Star Wars cartoons - even when Clone Wars ends, because there's Rebels to watch next. What a strange time this is.

Today's song of the day (month?) is one I've been meaning to write about almost the entire length of this blog, and the end of a month seems like as good a time as any other to throw it in. It's "At the Bottom of Everything" from Bright Eyes' 2005 album I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning. Like all good songs, it begins with a two-minute spoken word bit about crashing aeroplanes and parties before getting to the actual music. I think this is something that musicians should consider more often, but I know that we may not be at that place yet as a society.

Bright Eyes are the blueprint, and all that. Sure, there's lots of Big Relevancy and Look How Timely comments I could make about a song that is fundamentally about the ridiculousness of the process of coping under adversity, but I would like to leave it at the spoken-word bit. I'd listen to a song that was just that bit, and I consider the music that actually follows a pleasant bonus.

I'm reliably reformed that tomorrow is still a thing. See you tomorrow.