2. This Year

The session drummer, Alex Decarville, gives us eight flat beats per line on a snare and sixteen beats per line on a hi-hat. Darnielle chops his guitar to the snare’s rhythm but sometimes downstrokes sixteenth notes, along with the hi-hat, at the ends of the lines. Bruno’s low piano triads and Hughes’s up-in-the-mix bass line share a slightly syncopated three-stress rhythm: DAH—<beat, beat>—da-DAH. And the metronomic beat is overlaid by something melodic and a little sweet: the C#m in the chord progression (A-C#m-D-A, A-E-D-A) yearns, and when Hughes puts F#s under the Ds, or C#s under the As, those chords yearn too.

“I broke free on a Saturday morning,” Darnielle sings, in a lean, aggressive voice. “I put the pedal to the floor/Headed north on Mills Avenue/And listened to the engine roar.” That’s enough for a little while; the band plays eight bars without vocals. In live performances of the song, these instrumental sections sometimes have a barreling force; everyone in the band rises to the measure-starting beats and hits them explosively hard. In the Sunset Tree version (and in the demo version on Come, Come to the Sunset Tree), they’re a little more like the white space between quatrains. You take in what you’ve just heard and wait for what’s coming next.

My broken house behind me and good things ahead
A girl named Cathy wants a little of my time
Six cylinders underneath the hood crashing and kicking
Aha, listen to the engine whine

“I am going to MAKE it through this YEAR if it KILLS me,” Darnielle sings in the chorus, which stays on that simple A-E-D-A progression. “I am going to MAKE it through this YEAR if it KILLS me.” It’s funny in that half-non-funny way that he likes so much: I am going to make it through this year by expending, if necessary, all my vital energy—by potentially not making it through this year. But the heart of it is a straight-up affirmation of the I-am and its capacities: I am gonna make it through this year. Questions (how?) and doubts (what if you can’t?) miss the point: I am gonna make it through this year.

People need it. The song is “so specific for me,” Darnielle said in a 2008 interview, “the autumn morning I’m talking about, the girl I hung out with that day, the whole sense of it. But for a lot of people, the sentiment of the chorus, just that feeling of defiance in the face of hard circumstances, seems to have really connected.” But people need more than that, too, and the third and fourth verses are where that comes in. The speaker is in an arcade of some kind, drinking scotch and occasionally punching the video game machines (the song is set in the mid-1980s). “And then Cathy showed up and we hung out,” he sings, “Trading swigs from a bottle all bitter and clean/Locking eyes, holding hands/Twin high maintenance machines.” The feeling of two-ness opens things up; the last line, which Hughes harmonizes on, is one of the most infectious moments in the song. “Sometimes you are living in a house and you’re in high school and your stepfather is abusing your mother and you, and it really sucks . . . and the main thing that makes you feel better is the company of other people who are as damaged as you are or will shortly become as damaged as you are,” Darnielle said at a 2011 show. “You have this sensor that says ‘That person is either damaged or is getting there, and I think I will hang out with her until things get a little brighter.’” Your life doesn’t have to be a “single window giving on outer dark,” as Samuel Beckett puts it in Company. It can be, for starters, a single shared window. And then more than one window, and more than one being sharing it.

Two more quatrains left: a bridge, which adds the relative minor to the mix, and a final verse:

I drove home in the California dusk
I could feel the alcohol inside of me hum
Pictured the look on my stepfather's face
Ready for the bad things to come

I downshifted as I pulled into the driveway
The motor screaming out stuck in second gear
The scene ends badly as you might imagine
In a cavalcade of anger and fear

Darnielle’s delivery gets looser, he goes off in a meta direction (The scene ends badly as you might imagine), and the engine starts to feel like it’s interchangeable with his own revved-up being, converting fuel into energy and making sure that everyone hears what it sounds like. But his enraged stepfather is taking in that expression of energy and converting it into a punitive energy of his own, so much so that the scream from the transmission is like their scream: half anger, half fear. Everything is spinning out of control. And then, out of nowhere, right after “anger and fear,” comes one of the best things that has ever happened in a song:

There will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year

It’s a version of “Next year in Jerusalem,” the phrase that is spoken at the end of Passover Seders. As Darnielle sings it, he, Hughes, and Bruno rise from A to C#m to D and finally, on “year,” to E, and everything in the song is brought to its highest pitch. You can feel what’s coming next. You can feel how insanely and spiritually hopeful it is, how much it depends on the strange conviction that something in you can compete with, and maybe even triumph over, your own death. And you can feel where it’s coming from: not just from the speaker, or from Darnielle, but from an intuition of other consciousnesses, stretching backward and forward in time. I am going to make it through this year if it kills me. I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.