219. Song No. 3,302: “Feed the Fire,” Dawes
Passwords, 2018

I feel like I have such a complicated relationship with Dawes. They, like Fanfarlo and Jukebox the Ghost, took a few tries for me to find the right time and point of ingress to finally appreciate their work; unlike Fanfarlo and Jukebox, Dawes just isn’t a group that ever emerged as one of my all-time, squeal-eliciting favorites.

Which is a shame, but it also means that when I love one of their songs, I love it whole-heartedly for separating itself from a herd of hit-or-miss, occasionally clunky lyrics and disappointments like We’re All Gonna Die, which, despite a couple of songs I’m actually pretty fond of and an album title I can’t argue with, is forever tinged with that feeling of “Wait, did I download the wrong album? Is there another Dawes I didn’t know about?”

Not every band is going to be a Spoon or a Shins or a Matt Pond side project that unfailingly puts out album after album I love even as their sound evolves, and not every artist is meant to be: Favorites lose their comparative magic when you aren’t selective and stingy with your heart. I don’t want to disparage this band that I really do love and has given the world some tunes that I can’t help but belt out to match every ounce of relatable, cathartic emotion despite my terminally off-key renditions, but their more recent stuff has me pretty certain that earlier Dawes, the Dawes of the Nothing is Wrong and Stories Don’t End and especially All Your Favorite Bands era, is my favorite incarnation of them, as evidenced by how their last couple of records mean skipping around to find the songs I like best rather than singing along to song after song after song.

And while I do love that this year’s Misadventures of Doomscroller is a concept album that feels more like Grateful Dead than We’re All Gonna Die, it just didn’t grip me like their first handful of albums eventually did. Passwords was…. fine, but attending that album tour’s deeply satisfying crowd-pleaser of a show in two parts made me so relieved that they arranged their set lists to showcase a varied sampling of the entire Dawes catalogue.

But “Feed the Fire” is so much of what I love about Dawes. It effectively balances cynicism and optimism, a love of the art that chose you and the inevitable ennui that comes from making your passion your profession, the necessity of forging ahead despite the uncertainty of your path, and the reality of facing down how following your dreams eventually yields a vicious lesson in how and why familiarity breeds contempt. And the more I go back to this song, the more I love it for its brutal honesty and insight and willingness to say the things that the gratitude for Making It tends to nudge you toward silencing out of fear of appearing like an unappreciative, entitled diva.

My own modest career feels so much of this song. This is the year I couldn’t dodge a managing-editor role any longer, despite “senior writer” being the zenith of my professional ambitions. This is the year I realized that the unfocused direction of “I just want to write for a living!” isn’t much of a guide if I want to advance proportionally to my experience. This is the year when there were days and days of not putting a single word to digital paper because of tightly scheduled close dates, magazine management and navigating an inherently unpredictable, all-hands-on-deck industry, despite being a working writer whose primary function is slinging words for the media.

This isn’t the first year when “There’s a world outside my window I can barely even hear” made entirely too much sense and hit way too close to home, but it sure is the year when I started dropping hints that I would love to be a stay-at-home-dog-mom-and-housewife if it meant bowing out of the rat race for a little while to reprioritize my bigger-picture goals after 16 years of hyper-focusing on today’s deadlines and tomorrow’s assignments to the exclusion of what makes this world worth all the trouble of existing.

“Feed the Fire” is also prodigiously packed with lyrics that struck a nerve for someone who’s a terminal introvert and still decided to go into journalism, from “Trading where I’m at for some future destination” to “Working for attention I’ll eventually resent” to the brutally rhetorical “How could I look so perfect on the screen and so awful in the mirror?”

Every decision is a compromise between what you want and what you’re willing to go through to get there, and the daily grind of has a way of sharpening the edges of those things you’ve voluntarily resigned yourself to living with (like the permanent anxiety stemming from the discomfort of a new byline every week ensuring your constant community visibility) to grasp at a life you’re more content with than if you had chosen another, mentally easier path. And it’s hard to give a voice to that frustration when you feel like no one should be obligated to empathize with someone who did this to themselves to get what they wanted and were fully cognizant of, so it’s kind of a relief when someone far more famous and with a much bigger platform finds those words for you and invites you to sing along.