276. Song No. 4,180: “Half Moon,” Janis Joplin
Pearl, 1971

It feels like I should’ve already written about Janis and her songs a couple-three times by now, but I am happy to finally rave about my absolute favorite song of hers—an easy entry on my top-10 desert-island songs list—now that it’s getting its moment in the rotational sun. Any excuse to play the hell out of this one is something I’m gonna jump on for the infinite-repeat opportunities alone, especially in the dopamine-desert dead of winter when any blush of happiness is a welcome ward against the absolute worst season of all. Especially if you’re deep in the blah feelings of the first and second snowstorm in two years when you’re the kind of person who secretly celebrates a winter without snow.

I could’ve sworn I glommed onto this song while creating some late-college swap of intricately themed mixed CDs, but I’ve either been completely misremembering that for 18 years or botched recreating said playlist and never noticed ’til now. And I’m honestly a little annoyed by that lapse in recall either way, not for another indication that my brain is already pockmarked with gaps and errors even before my 40s officially come in for a landing but because I’d planned out a conveniently timed musing on the accidental but profound impact an affinity for playlist-slinging has on one’s long-term taste for the way it makes you pick through the musical garden of your library with a deliberate mission providing a whole new lens through which to experience an otherwise mostly familiar landscape of songs, and now it turns out that reality had other plans.

Whatever, it doesn’t really matter what song winds up illustrating that point, just like I guess it doesn’t really matter how you come across a song when it’s destined to meet up with you sooner or later. And this is one of those tracks that just dominates all its peers in play-time rotations:

I don’t feel like it’s hyperbole to say that most of my favorite songs are criminally under-appreciated ones. Similarly, it really is doing society’s collective earballs a gross misfortune that “Half Moon” isn’t the jukebox staple people automatically associate with Janis because it is just so good and showcases every reason why she deserves all of her musical immortality.

Like, the local indie radio station gets intermittent play time in my office, typically during themed summer Thursdays and end-of-year countdowns, and this year’s farewell to 2023 was a listener-selected ranking of the top 885 songs by women. We played along at work, and there was no question about the first song that came to mind while agonizing over my list buuuuut clearly no one else loves the track like I do since it wasn’t one of her four tunes to grace the list, so I’m here to sing its praises loudly and persistently enough to make up for that.

You can’t invoke the celestial plane without taking the song there—songs like “Rocket Man” or “Space Oddity” have to bring the cold isolation of space into horrifyingly, heartbreakingly palpable reality with the warmth of human connections for that emotionally resonating success, just like “Stairway to Heaven” couldn’t end in anything but that final thrashing crescendo you can feel inside you every time: Set the bar high in the title, and you gotta launch a song that bests those sky-high expectations and shows off what a fucking incredible tune can do. “Half Moon” also and easily scales those aspirational heights between each declamatory verse smoothly, sultrily undulating along with the seas it invokes and the piano that’s just pounding out one hell of a bluesy groove about the kind of love that revitalizes a person. And only Janis has the throaty vocals to sell it with the raw intensity and irresistible energy she brought to every lyric that tore itself from her.

It was hard, for sure, to stop hoarding music like an indie-bitch dragon after so many years of letting that be a driving force of my personality, and it’s songs like “Half Moon” that I want to share with other people because it rocks so hard and I love it so much and I just want other people to know how good four minutes of losing yourself in a great song can be. And what really matters right now is that, yeah, it is one of the most perfect windows-down-volume-up songs I’ve ever heard, but it does that so well that it is like a little piece of summer nights taking the edge off those moments when the stinging winter air hurts your face, and all of us getting brutalized by Jack Frost deserve a little escapist treat.