215. Song No. 3,240: “Falling Away,” Big Scary
Vacation, 2011

If my life depended on it, I couldn’t even venture a guess as to how this band and I crossed paths or why it was limited to exactly one album I couldn’t even name three defining characteristics of a couple months ago. Slothrop the iPod and Last.fm both report I’ve listened to Vacation three times before this project, and not in its entirety since April 2016. That’s really all I’ve got, and I wouldn’t even know if the machines were lying to me.

So I have no idea what my inroad to this album was or what inspired me to feed the whole thing to my iPod apparently years ago, but fuzzy first impressions forever lost to time make these second-chance reintroductions so much more enjoyable. Everything about Vacation is a mystery to me, and that kind of unintentional clean slate is a satisfying rarity in a music collection I know fairly well, or is at least generally cultivated with some deliberate intent.

Hubs and I just went away for a mini anniversary vacation, spending a few days at a seaside town neither of us had any kind of history with, save for that obligatory one-time day trip to the shore of our youths that was such a disaster the location was verboten territory for the rest of our childhoods that I think every Jersey kid has even a peripheral experience with. We spent the entire trip marveling at the privilege of getting to make such a wildly popular locale our own together and claim it as our place to get away to from here on out.

That feeling of getting to start a whole new history with something that was there all along but not in any personally significant (or even a casually nodding) way is one of those unexpected perks of cruising through my music collection and stumbling on songs I have owned for years but needed to meet me at just the right time in just the right way. This project has already taught me a lot about expectation and how it changes the entire terrain of a meeting ground: Listening to an album for the first time and wanting to find something to fall in love with that isn’t always there is an entirely different experience than expecting to be thrown into a wholly disjointed, often unfamiliar and deliberately unchosen musical adventure of discovery. It is boring at best and disappointing at worst when you want to be obsessively playing an album on helpless repeat but that feeling never comes; it’s an endeavor of infinite potential when you dive right in to uncharted waters. (I also think it’s a mighty fine argument for meeting the world with an open-hearted receptiveness to all the ways it can awe you, but let’s save that for a morning where I’m not on vacation and breakfast-drinking every ounce of that freedom.)

The point is, landing on the utterly alien landscape of “Falling Away” scratched some itch I didn’t even know I had immediately upon our long-overdue reintroduction. I expected nothing and it refused to come and go without giving me something to get cathartically, needfully hooked on. I gave the rest of Vacation a few solid listens because I was so addicted to this song and its sound, and even meandered pretty happily around more of Big Scary’s catalogue. There’s definitely potential for a new fondness to flourish, and it is a freaking joy to have yet another new-to-me band on my radar, but this track is already the bar everything else has to clear.

And, like so many other songs that caught my attention and wouldn’t relent until I got a few days of utterly enchanted repeat listens out of my system, “Falling Away” doesn’t just have a magnetic moodiness and vulnerability working in its favor: This is another instance of falling in love with a lyric I wanted so badly to exist that I misheard it into reality until Genius gleefully proved me wrong. But when a song begins with “They say it’s good for the heart / They say it’s good for the mind / They say the people we love / We leave behind” and the low-key grief you’ve been carrying around for more than a year recently got poked at again once your best friend put the rest of the country between the two of you, furthering a distance you could barely take at half this yawning void’s new scope, I think it’s forgivable to hear the latter half of “They say it’s people we know / They say it’s fractions and wholes” as “They say it’s friendships that fail,” thus reconfiguring the entire song that follows into the trauma sponge you need to pour all your ever-deepening fears and selfish hurts into.

And I’m sure there’s also a lesson in how initial misconceptions, no matter how powerfully compelling they are, don’t diminish the reality of how incredible something is in its own right, and that giving something a chance for whatever reason tends to pay off in dividends. Because by the time I figured out my error of interpretation, I was already so deep into this song and its hooks were too deep in me that some misheard words made for a decidedly inconsequential perspective shift. With musical wrap-ups poised to make their giddily received annual visit soon, I am so thrilled that “Falling Away” came around just in time to earn itself at least an honorable mention as one of 2022’s best, most endlessly playable musical finds.