263. Song Nos. 3,962 and 3,963: “Good Day,” Jukebox the Ghost
Let Live & Let Ghosts, 2008; Long Way Home: Live, 2016

I think that I would like
To invite everyone I’ve known, dead and alive
To a street where we can be
Finally free …
Suddenly, we all got young
Running circles around ourselves, just for fun
And, oh, how good it felt
To be young and loved and feel it in our bones

Speaking of bands’ older incarnations and how much I love them! Sure, I’m enjoying the more polished, more musically mature band that Jukebox is becoming, but their early days’ frequent apocalyptic invocations and comparative chaos are something special, and that sense of being dwarfed by something bigger and more signifiant than any single person is so perfectly embodied in this opening track of their debut album that remains a live-show staple.

This song, a Cocoon-esque flight of fancy and fantasy about restoring childhood’s freedom and joy to one’s nearest and dearest regardless of their age and proximity to the mortal coil, is obviously hitting a little differently these days, but it’s held a certain appeal for me even before the roughest month of my life kicked off with a panicked call to come home from work because my mother-in-law was being ambulance’d away…

Did everybody say what a good day that it was?
For everybody who said what a good day that it was
Did they smile ’cause they like it?

… because my incurable people-pleasing tendencies that have long outlasted the environment they were both born of and reinforced by sure do love to be seen and related to, and I would absolutely spend my perfect day wracked with concern until confirming that everyone I’ve ever known, dead and alive, was indeed having as good of a time as I was. (Just like how I couldn’t be in the same room as my husband the last time we ate hallucinogens together because I was so obsessed with the possibility that he wasn’t also having the time of his life watching the patterns of a wooden wall swirl and swim around themselves in time to the music I was getting gleefully lost in.)

There is something to be said about how much one’s happiness is amplified when your favorite folks are both sharing in and adding to it, not from any sense of codependency but from naturally wanting the best for those you love the most. And being the catalyst of their joy certainly is an extra dash of mood-boosting satisfaction, too, that makes good days and good moods even better ones for their mutually delighted-in experiences, even if they’re just the kind of lofty daydreams adults take as mental vacations to escape gut-punch realties for a little while.