21. Frog Eyes - “I Ain’t Around Much”
Carey Mercer belongs to my pantheon of contemporary lyricists. He has a way with words, stretching them and contorting them within his own bestial cry until they gain a life of their own. It;s almost like he hears them for something more then they are, reaching into the Platonic world of forms to briefly glimpse the true glory of language before then channeling and shaping it through the eccentricities of his own artistic lens. He’s one of the last true poets, because not only does he see the beauty in words, but he also sees the beauty in composition and cadence. He’s a maestro of the voice, manipulating it until it flows within the instrumentals, accompanying them as an equal, floating and intertwining with them in a slow and emotive ascendance toward pure beauty.
He’s also a man who knows sorrow. He’s an artist who has bathed in loss and felt it seeping into his pores to sicken his blood and constrict his soul. However, rather than succumbing to the pain - he channels it, tempering himseld with it. He translates the feeling back into sound, giving the pain a voice and a complexity fitting to its nuanced nature. Because pain isn’t always explicit - pain shouts of course, but it also whispers. Pain manipulates, hiding within and tainting its surroundings, until the mind can no longer trace it properly. Pain is a symphony, composed of a cacophony of notes, many of which are hidden, but all of which are important. When faced with such complexity, the plainness words always comes up short. Words need more. They need soul, they need to meld with the body and channel raw feeling, rather than simply reflecting the hollow confines of definitions that themselves rely upon further lifeless words. Words need to be contorted like the insides that birthed them. Words need to be uttered with same turmoil from which they originated and veiled in the same smoky confusion from which they arose. Metaphors give words mystery, volume gives them gravitas, and contorting words gives them a uniqueness worthy of life.
This song has all of that. It’s like the funeral march of the soul, an extraction of sorrow, a wringing of the body as you bleed it out and offer it up to heavens. This is the sacrifice of emotion, a self-flagellation of sorts. It’s a therapeutic journey through the labyrinth of pain and despondency, a stripping of the soul until all that’s left is the purity of fallowed ground. The last root to be torn is always the toughest. It’s the one that grows deepest, putting up the biggest fight as it reaches out to intertwine with the others and keep the soul captive. It’s this root that resonates most for me. Revealing itself in a line so simple, yet overwhelming in implication and delivery.
“You may never understand, you may never understand
that I just wanted to hear
the sound of a father saying goodbye.”
It’s a sentiment that I feel tearing deep within myself - a sentiment that I doubt I will ever fully extract. It’ll always be there, and I’ve learned to live with it, but it still doesn’t make it any easier. It’s this feeling of injustice, of being robbed of something sacred and precious. It’s a connection severed unceremoniously, an ending frayed and inconclusive, a relationship without closure, beyond closure, and a feeling that will always remain open, trailing of into an unending nothingness. It’s a wish beyond reparation - it’s simply gone, a relationship that evaporated rather than being laid to rest. As if it’s not the unburied body that haunts, but the unspoken goodbye.
