285. Song No. 4,359: “Heartworms,” The Shins
Heartworms, 2017

There’s been any number of reasons I’ve neglected this blog for weeks at a time as it nears its fourth year of existence: life, death, family obligations, work’s endless deadlines, getting really immersed in eking some joy from this timeline’s slowly collapsing end-stage hellscape. But I can’t say that I’ve encountered 2024’s biggest problem before, though, which would be an absolute embarrassment of musical riches. And from beefing up the CD collection I’m presently hyperfocused on curating like I have late-career money to burn on teenage whims, to a metric fuckton of concert-going opportunities to choose from, to seemingly every still-performing artist and outfit I love rushing to put out new music to the tune of having five consecutive Fridays of freshly dropped albums to enjoy with my morning coffees, 2024 has dumped a veritable bounty of aural treasures on my gratefully, greedily receptive earballs.

Younger Me, especially in my college days, used to dimly worry about one day facing a barren musical landscape pockmarked with the sad remains of long-defunct bands, leaving my fully formed digital library to stand as a stagnant but stalwart shrine memorializing a once-vibrant and -timely taste in tunes; it’s a fear I never fully shed, which is why it’s doubly delightful that bands I’ve loved for 20 years are still making music I want to hear AND there’s always something new (or at least new to me) to discover and devour.

And while it’s been such a novel treat to rearrange my CD collection for a shelf’s worth of new additions every few weeks and watching my 2024-release playlist inexhaustibly expand, I have missed this purposefully finite project and revisiting so many of these bands that have meant so much to me over not just years but decades.

The Shins are one of those bands I have loved so fiercely for so long that I’ll try anything their frontman James Mercer was even peripherally involved with. And while The Shins’ precursor Flake Music and more experimental cousin Broken Bells are treats unto themselves, honestly, nothing holds a candle to The Shins. Heartworms reflects just how much Broken Bells has influenced Mercer’s musical progression, but it still showcases so much of what I’ve loved about this band since their comparatively more traditional indie-rock debut Know Your Onion!, too, putting them in the same echelon as the likes of Nada Surf and Spoon when it comes to long-running bands putting out album after album stuffed with good goddamn songs.

To be fair, the newest Shins album is the one I’ve played the least—though not by any fault of its own beyond the bad luck of inauspicious timing. But its titular tune has remained one of my favorites from it, a simple song about unrequited love and tapping into one’s most impressive attributes as a last-ditch effort to win over an uninterested heart. It sings of how much that hurts, but there’s also that weird dash of giddy secrecy of fiercely protected unspoken affections making it all a little less insufferable sometimes, which this titular track does one mighty fine job of emulating with a deceptively buoyant melody crashing against lyrical pleas like “Anything to get some of your affection” and gutpunch realizations like “You’re the saddest dream that ever came true.”

And yeah, sure, it’s a little harder even just seven years later to reconcile the nuance between navigating the kind of misguidedly persistent infatuation that’s easy to mistake for love and obsessing over someone who hasn’t consented to being an object of affection, but it’s still a profoundly, vulnerably shared human experience to be heartsick over someone who’s just not meant to be your person, and Heartworms turns that pain into prettily painted and utterly relatable art.