282. Song No. 4,268: “Harold T. Wilkins, or How to Wait for a Very Long Time,” Fanfarlo
Reservoir, 2009

The reward for finally giving Fanfarlo the chance they deserved has been an absolute embarrassment of musical riches, and this anthem for perpetually out-of-place souls is one of my favorites.

There’s probably a whole subgenre within my now-14,607-song library of allegorical tales told through varyingly fictionalized accounts of public figures, and this is their king: an impossibly catchy reimagining of a familiar night in the life of its titular oddball detailing what it’s like to gaze expectantly into the skies night after night, eternally hopeful there’s something better and less ill-fitting waiting for them if they just take that leap of faith into the fantastically unknown that they are certain lies just beyond the realm of the mundane.

As someone who grew up on The X-Files and has always felt a little beyond the fringes of polite and normal society, it’s not hard to relate to a musical narrative dropping little gems of both extraterrestrial awe and a misfit’s isolation like “You’ve been packing your bags for the tenth time / You’ve been up on the roof again… / They’re coming any week now, / Left behind by the mothership” and especially “In a town where everyone will kick and scream / And come to the same conclusion every time / Time to realize you were never on the team / There was always a question hanging over you.” I’ve certainly fantasized at various stages of life about the thrill of starting over anywhere else and “looking over your shoulder and setting sail” once you’ve finally unmoored yourself from a world that will forever feel like reshaping yourself to be a little less conspicuously uncomfortable all the fucking time; this song makes me feel like I might not the only one indulging in those flights of fanciful imagination, and I appreciate knowing that there could other people out there doing there, even if they are skating dangerously close to the edges of deliberate pseudohistory.