204. Song No. 3,100: “Everybody Knows,” Jukebox the Ghost
Safe Travels, 2012

Jukebox the Ghost, the only band I’ve seen since the pandemic began (and also the last band I saw before COVID’s onset cancelled everything, including at least one of their shows in April 2020), has an album coming out this week from which they’ve been releasing a steady trickle of joyfully, celebatorily world-weary songs for months (including a beautifully balanced, fucking powerhouse collaboration with Andrew McMahon that I am so mad no one else is pointedly referring to as Jukebox in the Wilderness).

But well before it registered that I was getting a belated birthday present from one of my most beloved contemporary bands, I fell in love with “Everybody Knows” all over again, one of my absolute favorite underrated Jukebox songs that I have only neglected writing about for a month and half almost entirely due to a lack of time (I mean, discovering a new favorite has decidedly dominated my attention lately, but being stuck in professional limbo while waiting to find out how my title and responsibilities are changing has not been an insignificant development, either) rather than a dearth of effusive affinity. The upside is that letting a post marinate for, like, six goddamn weeks has facilitated a lot of on-repeat listens that not only allowed for giving myself permission to play this song over and over again to enjoy it with full-hearted abandon but also served as a mighty fine reminder that this album goes out with an emotional, if not understated, bang of a trio.

I wasn’t just rediscovering “Everybody Knows,” a deeply conflicted, irresistibly sing-alongable narrative that vacillates between what the heart’s been hung up on for three years and what the head and everyone else knows to be true: It’s time to let go. The two songs that accompany it in ushering Safe Travels to its conclusion, the aptly titled “The Spiritual” and the wholly liberated bonus track “A La La,” got a lot of accidental relistens, too, just by virtue of not always diligently hitting the repeat button. It was an accidental excavation that paid off in untold dividends, reintroducing me to how deeply intertwined and emotionally complementary the album’s outro of triplets are. “Everybody Knows,” though, remains my favorite, and the other two songs deserve their own time in the spotlight when their time comes.

I think everyone has that one person they’ve either carried with them well beyond their actual stay or eventually accepted as some small but eternally lingering part of themselves, but you don’t need to be intimately acquainted with the tangles of that feeling to appreciate how acutely it’s shaping every rise and fall of this song along the way to its musical crescendo. It doesn’t broach the mournful early stages of acceptance that “The Spiritual” does, nor does it come barreling in with the emergent victory of “A La La;” what it does do, however, is navigate the internal tug-o’-war of putting a past love squarely in the past despite a stubborn heart, underscoring the bigger conflict of being interminably attached to a wholly incompatible vapor trail of memory. It is compellingly human, brutally honest and infinitely self-examining is a way that is so thoroughly vulnerable in its feeling and resolute in its decision that it is absolutely impossible to play just once.