185. Song No. 2,760: “A Dozen Roses,” Braid
Frame & Canvas, 1998

In addition to dropping an extended sexual metaphor on my high school poetry class via a then-unknown Death Cab for Cutie senior year, I also used “A Dozen Roses” as an example of song-lyrics-as-poetry and, despite being a gatekeeping music snob who absolutely loathed it whenever the normals found my bands, can report with the utmost irony that I was secretly ecstatic when my classmates started passing around the album’s liner notes and someone asked to hear another song from my favorite Braid album. The whole point is proving who has the best taste without letting too many people in on the secret, and an already-defunct second-wave emo band seemed to be both teasingly out of reach for and safely uninviting to mainstream tastes.

“A Dozen Roses” is my favorite Braid song on my favorite Braid album, and it’s one that I haven’t stopped loving across two decades even though it doesn’t have as active a place in my life as it used to. It is one of those yardstick songs that measure just how far you’ve come since first falling in love with a specific piece of music that hasn’t changed a note since you first met, even if it is a little more nostalgic and you’re now a little older and creakier and maybe no more confident but at least considerably more secure.

While I first fell in love with the lyrics, it’s the song’s jangly, moody atmosphere and novel orchestration that I’m most fond of these days: Nothing else sounds like “A Dozen Roses” does, despite its obvious influences and hallmarks, and not enough songs have the biting confidence to go out on a blisteringly rhetorical note. And it is gratifyingly validating to know that a song whose sound remains my favorite part can boast how “this cool beat” has been its defining hook since the beginning.

Which definitely makes up for hindsight’s slap of realizing that I missed so many opportunities to adopt every applicable version of “Hurricane What’s-Her-Name” as an online handle over the years when it’s been right freaking there and I’ve been singing along to those lines since I was an angsty teenager whose emotions were the driving force of the human trainwreck I used to be. Teenage Me and Indie Rock Snob Me are both absolutely outraged by this oversight that could have been good for so many ironically-cool points and casually dropping just-obscure-enough lyrical allusions to see who’d volley back or at least appreciate the reference. _{(Because the only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool, right?)}