160. Song No. 2,366: “Dead Man’s Dollar,” Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness
Zombies on Broadway, 2017

One of the best parts of this project is the second-chance songs it’s given me. There are so many tracks it all but plopped right in front of me, finally demanding that I pay attention to some awesome tunes that flew right under my radar time and again for any number of right-song-wrong-time reasons.

I can’t always account for why or how I missed a song. There are songs I’ve listened to a thousand times before but never really heard. There are songs that didn’t resonate with me until I had some experience adjacent to or that shed a dawning light of empathy on lyrics I couldn’t fully appreciate until we were on the same side of a shared feeling. There are songs that just suddenly hit me out of nowhere.

“Dead Man’s Dollar” is one of those times a song just reached out and smacked the ever-loving shit out of me to make sure I didn’t miss it this time around. Zombies on Broadway is a victim of timing (and also not being as piano-driven as its predecessor, because I’m a sucker for gratuitous piano accompaniment), coming out well after my rabid obsession with the debut, self-titled Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness album had waned and settled into something much more casually, sporadically comforting.

And that’s a mighty shame because rediscovering this song led me back to the album it calls home, which is apparently jam-packed with songs I immediately recognized as things I’d distantly loved but hadn’t heard in ages. “Brooklyn, You’re Killing Me” and especially “Fire Escape” jumped out as particularly emphatic HOLY SHIT I FORGOT HOW MUCH I LOVE THIS SONG moments, while songs like this one finally had their chance to shine. But I guess showing up late is better than not showing up at all, so.

What got me first about this song was the line “I wanna make a life but I want to live there too.” There’s something profoundly weird and instantly comforting about hearing your own feelings so succinctly summarized for you and also voiced by someone else, and the fact that it’s applicable in both an intimately personal and a widely communal sense makes it all the more jarring. Any worthwhile observation about the seemingly impossible task of balancing your work with your life is always going to carry a hint of envy for not thinking of it first but this one being doubly relatable just makes me love it more.

I mean, I’m already politically and socially inclined to think that living to work is fundamentally exploitative bullshit anyway (and I say that as someone who actively likes both my field and job!), but this song is all about the human side of that equation, mulling over how doing what you love can alienate you from the people you love if you let it, and even my deeply introverted self knows that the most meaning comes from the people who mean the most. No matter the satisfaction I get from my job, hobbies and personal projects, they can’t love me back the way my nearest and dearest can, and that only becomes more apparent with time and circumstance underscoring that no relationship is forever because people are designed to follow their own trajectory rather than be your twin compass, and those few who are are ultimately, inherently temporary.