62. The National - “Day I Die”

The National’s Sleep Well Beast is full of songs that are steeped in marital strife. Listening to it is like watching the facade of a relationship slowly begin to crack and break apart due to the pressure of emotion and the tremors of errant unaddressed thoughts. This jam in particular captures the discord perfectly. It’s pace speaks to the unease that creeps into the soul. Those instances where it feels as if the world is suddenly moving too fast to properly track, and so in an attempt to keep up your thoughts inadvertently begin to match its pace.

It’s as if you’re no longer in control. Your sense of calm and ability to rationalize are gone. Your worries and doubts have taken control. The what-ifs begin to mount until you’re drowning within the shadows of possible or potential realities. You’re a mess, lost within a world of confusion where everything suddenly seems to chafe.

It’s a feeling that’s perfectly summed up by the refrain of the chorus. You’ve taken a vow of “till death do we part”, and yet suddenly you’re wondering if that’s even possible, if in the end you’ll still be with each other – if you’ll even know each other, or maybe, in a fleeting and uninhibited bout of the imagination, you even begin to wonder if one of you will be responsible for the death of the other.

Anything seems possible in the moment, and yet through it all you ride the chaos, gathering yourself, holding on and gripping even tighter, partially out of commitment and partially out of sheer stubbornness. You can’t help it. You love each other. Throughout all of the emotion and errant thoughts, even within the hate and displeasure, there lies a seed of love, of something undying and irreplaceable, of something unique to the two of you, incapable of being replicated anywhere else, this reality or the next.