277. Song No. 4,186: “Haligh, Haligh, a Lie, Haligh,” Bright Eyes
Fevers and Mirrors, 2000

Every lyric—literally every line of this song, especially the most painfully overwrought ones—is a snapshot of late high school and early college. It was one of those albums that every friend group and signifiant person seemed to like or was at least passingly familiar with, even if it was the only Bright Eyes album they found listenable or just had some richly biographical attachment coloring it in a personal significance that was always a goddamn treat to be let in on and trusted with.

It is a million mixed CDs and visceral memories and shared moments and the first terrible taste of finding out that bruised egos hurt a fuck of a lot more than broken hearts but that confusing the two actually hurts the most and the spark of coincidental recognition that any too-emotional weirdo who sought refuge in wandering Philly after school would feel in lines evoking “the words we spoke on freezing South Street.”

It is an endless parade of cryptic away messages, deliberately truncated to remain emotionally elusive if you knew the source (“We keep coming back / To this meaning that I lack“) and maddeningly histrionic if you didn’t. (“And I sing and sing of awful things! / The pleasure that my sadness brings!”)

It is inscribing ornately rendered lyrics across and stylizing them to fit any available white space on a pair of lovingly defaced Chucks. (“It’s just a mumbled sentence to a passing acquaintance / But there was once you“)

It is the angst of an emo kid with poor emotional regulation suddenly realizing their feelings are veritably microscopic against the backdrop of the greater, far more interesting world at large, and that navel-gazing stops being endearing at a certain age and starts becoming maddeningly juvenile soon after. (“You said you hate my suffering / And you understood / And you’d take care of me / You’d always be there / Well, where are you now?“)

It is so weird to experience so much time so experientially differently and so tangibly similar, all of it filtered through a song from which I have cherry-picked so many lyrics as stand-ins for outwardly dealing with my own feelings but that, as a whole, had been the catalyst for essentially unclogging my emotional backlog in private better than any professional therapy session could for a good couple of years there. But, as the accidental theme of this blog has proven time and again, it’s also fascinating to excavate these time-capsule songs and relive the parade of snapshot memories that re-emerge with them, only this time with the safety of distance and perspective of an entire life lived since then.