225. Song No. 3,389: “Fireflies in a Steel Mill,” The Elected
Sun, Sun, Sun, 2006

Man, do I miss fireflies. I don’t mean in a seasonally depressed kind of way betraying how vastly I prefer the warmer seasons: I miss the largely unstructured summers of my youth and all the ways they seemed more magical and infinite and filled with potential and wonder and daytime bike rides to nowhere and evening walks to escape. The chirp of the tree frogs and crickets set against the Morse-code flashing luminescence of countless lightning bug swarms exemplifies summer like few other things can, and now being grateful when I see a few lonely flickers at all is the saddest kind of awed nostalgia adulthood’s thrown at me.

“Fireflies in a Steel Mill” comes close to not just emulating but emanating that hazy half-speed of high summer, though, and anything that feels like warmer times is doubly appreciated in this days-long bitter cold snap from a winter that’s apparently wasting no time making itself at home, though I think that summertime feeling might be an inherited association from this song’s unfailing presence on mixed CDs and playlists for a solid year after I first heard it, which coincided with the first time in my life I both owned a car and forced myself to get comfortable driving new places and long distances—all of which were new freedoms necessitating a soundtrack full of stuff I didn’t mind coming along for ride after ride.

While The Elected is a Rilo Kiley side project, I honestly think I found them by way of this song landing on pre-merger Sirius radio’s Left of Center channel (RIP), the post-graduation lifeline to new music that did a pretty solid job filling the void born of leaving the college radio station behind. And even though the sophomore album this song was a part of is a nice little slice of thoroughly modern Americana, being introduced to an otherwise solid collection of songs by way of its best track is always a slightly disappointing introduction that sets up an album for failure, and is probably why I never explored much of their discography beyond Sun, Sun, Sun but concentrated an entire catalogue’s worth of love on this one song I’ve chosen to love in my own weird way instead.

Because I do absolutely love this song and its positively theatrical arc, but it’s a song that I love for how it sounds more than anything else; to be perfectly honest, since “Fireflies in a Steel Mill” has a way of becoming the best kind of background music, I think I’ve caught maybe five or six lines of lyrics in the nearly two decades I’ve been playing this song on endless repeat, but they’ve all been lyrics that endear this song even more to me (and I can’t even venture an educated guess as to whether that’s despite or because of a total lack of context). “Those ideas that never get finished / Well, that’s what we are” and “But the landlord’s at the door / Saying your check’s signed in disappearing ink” and “Oh, Emily, / You can’t hold your drink” and the hollered-from-the-heart “This is the last time you’ll do this to me!” let me kind of piece together my own personal narrative for this song to follow to make it more selectively applicable when it did grab more of my conscious attention than usual.