287. Song No. 4,339: “Heart of a Wolf,” Ed Harcourt
Lustre, 2010

By the time Lustre came out, I had a college degree, a new last name, already left newspapers for the first time, and devoted at least a decade’s worth of time and energy to broadening the boundaries of my musical taste: As foundational as Ed Harcourt was in the high-school days of musical discovery and as quickly as I jumped on adding this record to my collection, his fifth album just didn’t have the impact that meeting his first one did.

But! The silver lining of not giving one album the fervent love your long-exhausted teenage energy and bandwidth once offered its oldest sibling is that it’s always there to revisit, especially if you’re casually working through your musical library with the distinct purpose of finally giving overlooked masterpieces another change to fall in love with them.

Both this album and this song are indeed true second chances, with 12,700 Songs being the opportunity I apparently needed to realize just how much ground this album covers thematically, lyrically, emotionally and musically. From the lush titular opening track coming in on the orchestral splendor of a choir and crescendo to the music-box whimsy of the closer and all the poppy, richly layered and genre-hopping tunes between, I’m almost embarrassed that it took me all this time to appreciate how ambitious and rewarding the entirety of Lustre‘s nearly hour-long run time is.

I cannot believe that “Heart of a Wolf” especially took this long to glom onto. It is dark and moody and feels like the best of Tom Waits and The Real Tuesday Weld rising up to meet a musically maturing Harcourt to create an irresistibly anthemic, unsuspectingly uplifting slice of goth-tinged, intricately crafted four-minute masterpiece.

From jangly sound effects beginning with what I will forever interpret as a typewriter return brandished like a weapon and ending on exuberant wolf howls to a maelstrom of expertly orchestrated musicality driving a pep rally for one, this song is just so much fun to listen to that it’s actually hard to stop listening to it.

There’s a lot of things that I’m a sucker for music-wise, and things like a killer piano hook and the interplay of words and music telling two different stories top that list. And this deceptively foreboding melody caring lyrics like “You can make it on your own, my darlin’ / ‘Cause I know you’ve got the heart of a wolf / When you’re crazy and your head is hurtin’ / Don’t forget you’ve got the heart of a wolf” and “I’ve watched you trudge through some hellish times / Your heart is lupine, you don’t need to cry” emphasized by blaring trumpets befitting a victorious return is suuuuuch a good musical rendering of what it feels like to be overwhelmed with life’s maelstroms but reminded at a critical nadir that you are, indeed, the storm that lesser ones yield to.

(Say hi to 12,700 Song’s first post on a laptop from this decade! The best part of being where forced obsolescence goes to die is how novel it is finally upgrading to decidedly modern technology.)