20. Waving at You
[The aim is going to be a little simpler in these 20 articles than in the previous ones: I’m going to try to make the spirit of the song reappear a little bit in the words on the page, for the sake of extending the experience of the song if you’ve already listened to it or of introducing the song to you if you haven’t. Other things will happen too, but that’ll be the main thing. Also, I’m happy to say that my son Colin will be contributing original artworks to some of the updates, including this one.—G.S.]
“At the time I was a lot more interested in sudden songs, and sudden insights and visions that would terminate,” Darnielle said later. “My earlier songs were really like, ‘Here’s the thought I have right now and the single image of the “petals on a wet, black bough.”’” (He’s quoting Ezra Pound’s two-line poem, “In a Station of the Metro,” which goes: “The apparition of these faces in a crowd/Petals on a wet, black bough.”) He would eventually feel it as a limitation, would eventually want something more complicated than verse-tagline-verse-tagline, but against the backdrop of all the expertly varied three-chorus songs out there, those get-in-and-get-out songs can feel almost painfully valuable. Especially when the two units are a step and a step beyond of some kind—not a big stride, just a scuffle forward. Or, in the case of “Waving at You,” when there are three sleepwalked steps, and the last one is a near-awareness of love.
It starts with a G capoed up seven frets and the boombox grinding away. The progression, downstroked in triplets, cycles through four chords, each of which is played on the bottom four strings only: G-Gsus2-C/E-D/F#. “Listen you can tell your lawyer,” he sings, in a light, high, proto-Full Force Galesburg voice, “That he can go to hell/’Cause I can take whatever you are offering up/Reasonably well/Four long years come to nothing/It’s all right/But it’s your birthday/It’s your birthday toniiight”—and finally the chord pattern changes, we fall back from the final D/F# to a C/E—“and I went to buy you something/But I caught myself in time.” And that’s it, that’s the moment; the speaker feels, in the act of catching himself, that he had been about to drop through some trap door. The C/E (went) had led to a D/F# (some-), and then to a G (caught) and then to C/E again (time), and now he repeats that pattern: “And nothing makes any sense anymore/But everything rhymes.” Once again by means of a held syllable (rhyyymes), the song turns over, into another new chord pattern (G-D/F#-G-C/E, G-D/F#-G-C/E, G-D/F#-G) and a verse addressed not to his about-to-be-ex-wife but to his feelings for her:
Die hard, die kicking
Old habit of mine
Die hard, die kicking
Old habit of mine
Die hard, die hard, die kicking
The voice goes silent but the guitar doesn’t, not yet. He returns to the first progression, strumming it harder and faster than before, so that you hear its percussiveness more than you hear its tones. He runs through it three times and then hits the G, the tonic chord, 37 times in a row.
It’s not the kind of story that rock songs usually tell: divorcing guy catches himself doing something romantic for his wife, realizes that beneath his go-to-hell attitude is something larger and stranger than toughness, and finds himself wanting that something to survive inside him as long as it possibly can. But that’s only part of what makes the song so special. “After Sweden and Nothing for Juice I’d reckoned which songs of mine I was proudest of, which ones felt truest, and they were always the sad ones,” Darnielle wrote. “‘Grendel’s Mother,’ ‘Waving at You,’ ‘Snow Crush Killing Song.’ And I wanted to get better at that kind of song, so I put most of my eggs in that basket and started writing Full Force Galesburg.” “Waving at You” and the “quieter” songs on Nothing for Juice, like “1 Corinthians 13:8-10,” were “like fingers pointing toward the stuff that I’d be doing in The Coroner’s Gambit,” he told an interviewer in 2005. “[I was] looking for a way to encapsulate a special, somewhat dark but also sweet mood inside a very small, very simple song.” That mood arises, in “Waving at You,” from the “circular droning looping” chord progressions, from the train-of-thought structure—verse, verse, verse 2.0, verse 3.0—and from the intensity of the outro, where the strumming takes over. But because the song is so small (2:34) and so simple (4 chords, 84 words), and because it changes so subtly as it develops, the mood feels weirdly fragile, as if it could be dropped or broken at any moment. At each of its transitions and extensions (I caught myself in time), the song opens up a little more to its mood, the way a sentence does when you go back in and insert a clause between commas; suddenly there’s a little bit more weight and the whole thing swings differently. Sometimes that’s how things unfold, by becoming a little bit more of what they already invisibly/potentially are. You wave goodbye, you wave a little more energetically, and just like that, then is now, and something is alive and moving in you. Call it a habit, if it’s easier that way, but that’s not what it is.