26. Mount Eerie - “Pumpkin”

This is Mount Eerie’s fourth song to make it on this list. Now normally having four songs by one artist on a year-end list is a cardinal sin that I try to avoid for the sake of diversity, but Sauna is an album that defies this stipulation. It’s pure poetry, speaking to me and my anxiety in ways that other artists and songs seldom can. Every word is so simple yet poignant, painting a picture that somehow manages to put words to the feelings and thoughts that seem beyond explanation, and often drown any attempt at explanation. So now lets endure me trying to explain the explanation of my thoughts.

This song is set in November, a month known most well for ushering in the holidays, and less for the end of Daylight Savings. However for me, the latter has always been more important than the first, because despite the supposed cheer of the season, it’s a time that troubles me psychologically as I try to acclimate to days that are entirely too full of an oppressive darkness. This darkness always manages to find its way into my mind, permeating my thoughts and bringing about more bouts of anxiety than any other time of the year. So needless to say, within the opening few words of this song I was under its spell, feeling the soft underbelly of my anxiety exposed.

Then the song goes on to perfectly explain the manifestations of my anxiety. It’s a feeling of precariousness, of a lack of security in life and within my own mind. I always get lost in my thoughts when anxious, perseverating on pointless ideas, stuffing the ordinary with overwhelming significance, and creating unease from the most benign of circumstances. My overwhelming focus removes me from reality, because reality becomes subjective rather than objective, it becomes something it’s not, because it becomes me. I’m completely focused, yet simultaneously aloof.When I feel this way I always need to move, almost as if the only way to ease my wandering thoughts is to have my body wander itself, hoping that somewhere along the way the two will realign and shift back into a normal state of existence.

Lines like the following capture these feelings perfectly:

“I walked to the bookstore in a rain that silently filled the air
All the lights were off or dim and there was nothing to do
But walk to town and back

In every ordinary moment looking at trash on the ground
By the bulldozers in the dusk I forget myself
And see universes forming

Pulled back out from a dream of rolling landscapes
I face the moment

Looking at garbage pretending the wind speaks
Finding meaning in songs, but the wind through the graves is just wind”

And that’s what makes this song so sublime and beautiful. It captures both of the above moments perfectly. Only it’s not overly verbose and confusing like my own writing can so often be - its simple and matter of fact. It states the doldrums of a day and a wandering mind, yet it does so in such a way that if you’ve been there yourself, the simplicity becomes overwhelmingly poignant, transcending the normal to become the purest form of art.