181. Song No. 2,663: “Don’t Carry It All,” The Decemberists
The King is Dead, 2011

If The Decemberists aren’t my favorite band then they’re at least solidly among my top three and have been since college. I keep saying that I have favorite albums of theirs rather than favorite songs, which might have been the right description once but isn’t actually completely accurate anymore. The King is Dead, the album where they whole-heartedly leaned into the Americana sound they’d been coyly courting for years, is probably the turning point where I started preferring single tracks to the overall whole. It’s a weird overlapping of worlds, though, because I have declared my love for nearly every individual song on here but rarely put this album on when I want to get lost in a band I’ve loved so much for so long.

And there’s no reason to be so lukewarm about a band that doesn’t have one meh album in their catalog, just albums I haven’t been listening to and loving for half a lifetime: When I think of The Decemberists and my fondness for them, it’s their output from the first half of the ’00s that I land on first and longest, especially their first two full-lengths and the Five Songs EP.

“Don’t Carry It All” led me back to this album I listened to endlessly when it first came out, especially during its auspiciously timed release coinciding with my husband’s week-long work trip, when I freely filled my house with a band I love and my whimsy-hating spouse deeply loathes, getting to know the hooks and crannies of an album I’d been eagerly awaiting for months. Being reminded of how much I love these individual songs rocked me right back to how thoroughly I enjoyed getting lost in what I now retrospectively realize was an evolutionary milestone in The Decemberists’ sound but, in that moment, was awash in tbe gleeful glow of my favorite band releasing a new record.

A decade later, it’s an interesting opportunity to take stock of how much I’ve changed by coming back to this song’s slice of communal living that once sounded blissfully cohesive and frankly idyllic, only to zero in on the lyric “You must bear your neighbor’s burden within reason” as the most important lesson here.

Sure, there’s some comfort of community in knowing that same individual onus “becomes a burden borne of all and one” but, man, I have spent far too much time yelling about people who habitually pass their troubles onto everyone else without ever once accepting accountability in that desperation to rid their vastly privileged existence of the first sniff of their actions having consequences. Or people who are the first to say “Sorry, I can’t help” in casual defiance of all the times you’ve rushed in be there for them. (I mean, I still would jump at the chance to establish a mountain commune, but the people I’d feel confident relying on have changed dramatically as the pandemic wears on and shows longtime friends’ true colors.)

Rather than letting the fustration and cynicism take hold, though, it’s better to be cognizant of only shouldering others’ troubles in moderation. Like the clichés of memed advice dispensing shockingly helpful platitudes say, you can’t pour from an empty cup, nor should you set yourself on fire to keep others warm. Giving to others according to their need and your ability is just as foundational for maintaining equilibrium in a pre-industrial agrarian commune as it is in any interconnected community—which is to say modern society itself. And that might not be either the point or the message of “Don’t Carry It All,” but it’s certainly worth keeping in mind as we rely more and more on our neighbors’ direct action and teamwork than a ruling class that’s made it abundantly clear that public officials rarely give a soaring fuck about the public’s well-being.