203. Song No. 3,081: “Every Thug Needs a Lady,” Alkaline Trio
Good Mourning, 2003

It always feels kind of blasphemous to admit when a band’s most accessible album is my favorite but Good Mourning is for sure the Alk3 album I love the most. Both a lingering college-era association and being released within days of my birthday work in its favor to inspire a little extra, highly personalized fondness born from the good luck of good timing.

Aside from my own intensely personalized reasons for loving this album a little extra hard, Good Mourning is not only where so many of my favorite Alkaline Trio songs live but also another example of what treats that the happenstance of track listing can yield: “Every Thug Deserves a Lady” being immediately followed by “Blue Carolina” is such a delightful display of the phenomenon where my favorite album tracks are placed sequentially, which is one of the best rewards for devouring music as albums rather than individual songs. But it also makes hearing them both on their own serve as a nice reminder of how good they are as standalone tracks I individually love.

I was late to the Alk3 party, being drawn to a more mellow, stereotypically emo sound than their comparatively angrier, almost violent explosion of frenetic instrumentalization and lyrics that sounded more like heartbreak’s white-hot rage than the quieter, introspective wallowing I preferred. I got a lot more into them in the summer between high school and college, especially after “Fuck You Aurora” grabbed me by the earballs and never let go, in a way that only relating entirely too much to a song about losing someone to the tyranny of distance can inspire.

By the time Good Mourning dropped, I was eagerly awaiting its arrival and not at all disappointed by the bountiful gifts it had to share. Chief among them was an evolution of sound that perfectly straddled what I had come to love about Alk3 and what I loved about music in general, especially Vagrant Records’ bands. They’re a band I’ve lost track of over the years but revisiting this song and this album rocked me right back to how head-over-heels I was for Good Mourning for years.

“Blue Carolina” tends to edge out this song by a nose, largely on the merit of the lyric “All of my favorite singers have stolen all of my best lines” remaining a favorite that’s taken up permanent residence in my brain for as limitlessly applicable it is. It was nice to get some alone time with this one, which is honestly the kind of lyrically and emotionally superior of the two.

This song, though, has lines like “I will follow anyone who brings me to you,” which resounded with my early-college indie-rock heart so much that I loved this song just for being crafted around that structural thesis and played it endlessly just to full-heartedly sing along to it again and again until it becane as familiar as a line from my own heart put to someone else’s song.