284. Song No. 4,440: “Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect,” The Decemberists
Castaways and Cutouts, 2002

God. I love. This song. I’m seeing The Decemebrists in about 24 hours as an early birthday present to myself so I’ve been playing their stuff a lot lately, and it’s been a lovely reminder that this tune is just one of so, so goddamn many of theirs that’ve had me singing along from all kinds of places throughout the years. Like, it doesn’t take a deep dive to appreciate the wide range of people I’ve had in the back of my mind over the decades that I have loved both this song and all those ghosts of the past with my whole heart while belting out “And just to lay with you / There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do” or “Guess it’s better to turn this way” or feeling the palpable impact of that titular line.

I’ve been creeping on the setlists for this tour because I will forever dread being at a show and fumbling my way through the less-familiar lyrics of any beloved band’s inevitable crop of B-team ditties; instead, perusing those lists has just been a statistically improbable occurrence of breathily cooing “Oooohhhh, I love that song!” stretching into deeper cuts and EPs I have etched into my heart and love just as much as the stuff snagging millions of plays on Spotify.

“Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect” straddles both those worlds beautifully, though. Its 21,000,000+ Spotify plays don’t tell you about how this song rocketed to its place among my top-five favorite songs to ever exist and dug in its goddamn heels for 20-some years and counting. Every replay is a homecoming adding its own dimensionality to a song that has lived so many lives and has been played across so many emotional states and physical locations until it’s burrowed into its own little piece of me to become inexorably intertwined. Those songs that just feel like yours because you know their paths and dips and nuances as well as your own physical self do absolutely become a part of you, and this is another one that I feel so completely that I still want its lyrics written somewhere on my body instead of hidden away within.