273. Song Nos. 4,098 & 4,099: “The Greatest Wonder”
Gratitude: Gratitude, 2005; Jonah Matranga: Alone Rewinding, 2017

I love these little moments of alphabetical happenstance, when two previously and wholly unrelated songs cozy up next to each other in a title-based reshuffling and accidentally show off how thematically intertwined they’ve been all this time, which is exactly what happened with this song coming so closely on the heels of Jukebox’s “The Great Unknown” in triplicate. Narrowing the scope from what life has in store if you just take that leap of faith into the future to realizing the mutually transformative power of a love story for the ages in such an effortless bound of proximity makes those songs go awfully well together, especially when both (or I guess all five, given that the two tunes are multiply represented here) are presented with such authentic, earnest optimism for whatever comes next.

In both versions of Jonah’s awestruck, sung-from-the-heart anthem celebrating the moment you open yourself up to the kind of life-affirming love that changes everything, right on down to the trajectory of your existence and the growth of yourself as a human capable of proportionally reciprocating the reward of finding one incredible soul who gels so well with your own, there’s that sense of wonder that’s the closest thing to magic we’ll ever know and, as such, merits nothing less than the kind of amazement that reminds you never to take for granted such a profound love—and it doesn’t matter if it’s romantic, platonic or something else entirely, so long as it fills your heart with the best that we’re capable of giving someone else—and the person who’s half of what makes it possible in the first place.   

It’s that sense of empowerment that pairs so perfectly with the same that’s on full display in “The Great Unknown.” It’s that build and release of feeling like you’re on the precipice of something incredible and inevitable and indescribable because whatever happens is exactly how things are meant to play out but, here, it’s more about an intimate connection between two people rather than giving yourself up to whatever the future holds just for you. And, honestly, you can’t get to the former without going through the latter, making it a nice little lesson in better living by deciding it’s time to live better.