I get asked about “Anyway” from The Bad Years a lot. I’ll try not to repeat myself here. I went into a lot of depth in this interview if you want to know more obvious stuff.
The character isn’t me – at all. I don’t think I’ve ever been so sardonic in my life (except maybe when I was 10 – another story for another day). But in my twenties, I had several friends who were my age die. The first one was when I was twenty. She got drunk and fell three stories out of a college dorm window. The second and third happened within a few weeks of each other. One died of a terminal illness and the other got hit by a bus crossing the street in a foreign country. The Mad Ones was always connected to grief. But this song isn’t Sam and it isn’t me. “Anyway” was an exploration of anger and guilt and posturing. The Bad Years has always been a tapestry, an ensemble show. As a result, the songs tell the whole story of a character. You have to immediately know who they are. When people ask questions about context for “Anyway”, I have to admit that it doesn’t matter. The song tells you everything you need to know. And there’s no personal context hidden under the surface like in “Not a Love Story.”
I didn’t expect to see you here –
I mean outside, smoking. I’m more of a nicorette girl these days.
I’m joking.
I mean – I did quit.
But who feels like joking now?
I’ll see you your scowl and raise you a furrowed brow.
This first verse is about establishing who you are. You’re a little nervous and uncomfortable. You’re trying to get a laugh. One of the biggest issues we have with performers tackling the song is when they play the end of the song from the beginning.
It’s sad. Of course it’s sad. What’s interesting is when it isn’t. It’s when you’re vamping, trying to stave off the sadness.
The original setting was outside a funeral, or maybe outside a house where people were sitting shiva. Don’t think about that too hard because the circumstances of The Bad Years have changed (now it’s at the house party). Either way, there’s a sense of someone escaping a claustrophobic space, needing air, and finding the last person you wanted to be alone with – a ghost of christmas past. Picture an arrow. The person who died is the center point and you two are at opposite sides.
You were never close but here you both are. This song is not even trying to bridge the gap. This isn’t a relationship song. It’s a confession song. But the listener (and thereby we as the audience, the stand in) are put into the awkward position of a friendship that never quite took.
Then comes the hook:
Anyway. Anyway.
The hook was the inspiration for the song. I had come up with this musical idea to stretch out the word “anyway” as well as the turn from “anyway" as a restart to “any way” as a plea, like, 10 years ago. I’d written this weird Ani DiFranco-esque lyric when I was fooling around with trying to learn how to write music to songs. We held onto it until we had content that felt like the right emotional territory for it. As soon as we hit on wanting to write a song about immediate grief from the perspective of someone who isn’t emotionally open, we took this hook out of the trunk.
Do you remember how we used to read
Rilke, Joyce?
And we barely understood it, But it gave us a voice
Or a language…
I don’t read poetry anymore.
But if I did,
I’d be reading it tonight for sure.
First thing’s first: the other character isn’t named Joyce, ok? The references are Rainer Marie Rilke and James Joyce. If that was really obvious to you, good on you. If not, you’re welcome.
The silence that you get back from the other character gives you latitude. Your mind starts to wander. I think of the other character in this moment – how there are moments where you don’t know where someone who’s talking to you is going, and it’s almost scary. I remember my mom telling me stories about her childhood that felt off limits when I was a teenager – these windows into who she was, how she became who she became. I remember not speaking for fear of her realizing I was there: true monologue with an audience, where the person goes deeper and deeper into their internality but it’s spoken aloud.
This verse starts a bit more external – a memory, wry – something I’ve thought about, how I used to read poetry all the time. I searched the lines for meaning. And now, I almost never pick it up. It’s so therapeutic, but it never occurs to me anymore. I used to do the same thing with songs. Now I rarely go back and trying to analyze them. It’s an act so anchored in your teen years when your taste is forming. By the end of this stanza, you’ve lost your audience – you’re thinking aloud.
Oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.
Then you remember – you’re talking to someone. It’s a little weird. It’s a little embarrassed. You’re not getting that affirmation that you might want.
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh –
It makes you feel awkward, but your brain is going now. You can’t stop it.
I keep thinking about how the timing seems false, How some days seem faster than my fucking pulse.
And others go so slow.
Like this morning
Feels like a month ago.
Oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.
You’re getting lost. The weekend of my third friend’s memorial was back in Pennsylvania and, by some horrible trick of luck, it was booked on the same weekend as our mutual friend’s wedding. I went to the wedding on Saturday night and the memorial on Sunday afternoon, and so did my friend. She was still wearing her wedding hair as we held hands and cried. I felt like that weekend would never end. Every time I think about post-funeral meals at someone’s house, the warmed over lasagna, the hard dry dinner rolls, it feels like time stretches out like dough. But the entire summer I spent with my friend who got married and my friend who we mourned went by in a snap. Does that make any sense? You’re just thinking aloud. You’re just trying to make sense…
Which leads you to a new thought:
I feel like I’m underwater. I feel like I’m underwater. I feel like I’m underwater.
It’s muted underwater. Everything moves at a different speed. If you scream, no one can hear you. If you open your eyes, it’s beautiful, but you can’t breathe. You can’t survive there.
The first time you hit the idea, it should feel so surprising to you, such an attempt to name something that hadn’t previously been named.
And then you brush it off. It’s nothing.
Anyway. Anyway.
Start over. Full reset.
When we were in rehearsals for The Mad Ones, we talked a lot about “Go Tonight” and why the moment existed – much of the song is about replaying a moment that we already replayed. But the first time, we don’t deal with why it mattered. Sam doesn’t name for herself the point of it (that going back over these moments won’t change the moments but that at the center of this ONE moment, she feels something that she needs to hold onto and take with her).
Here, in “Anyway”, you haven’t hit the dark places you need to go. You scratched the surface but you need to start again, try again. It’s the most basic instinct. You return to the scene of the crime. You write your memoir. You experiment with recovered-memory therapy. Now that you know what it feels like to scratch the surface of the feeling, you need to go at it one more time and see where it leads you.
There’s this building you pass On the subway to Queens – It’s on the L or the R or the one that’s green. [the G train. It’s the G.] – It’s covered in tags, [graffiti] Bright hieroglyphics. These fifteen-year-olds – [taggers] They’re so fucking prolific.
I’m commuting,
I’m eating my goddamn apple
And they’re secretly painting their Sistine Chapel. But whatever,
It’s like they know their odds. If you’re gonna die young, you’d better live like gods. Gods. Gods.
You’ve done this, right? You’ve looked at the impossible. You’ve stared at graffiti 20 stories off the ground. You’ve thought the twin thoughts of ‘why would you risk your life to spray paint on a wall that will only get painted over, or worse, torn down?’ (as with the 5 Pointz, though check this out if you want to see who got the last laugh there), and ‘how glorious.’
The fact is that the kids who are graffitiing walls are in danger. They’re crying out. They need someone to pay attention, to know they were here, because without that, the world may never notice. And they know something we, commuter mortals, forget: we’re going to die.
This is a small point but I think it matters. You’re being kind of a dick by saying some of this. You’re romanticizing something that’s not romantic. You’re equating things that aren’t equal. The death of your friend is not endemic. The incarceration and lower life expectancy of the majority of young urban men who are making street art is. But you’re right on one count:
We might die tomorrow. We might get hit by a bus. Make something now. Otherwise, your mourners will read poetry from your elementary school projects at your memorial. I’ve seen it happen. Dare to try to make something impossible / glorious that lives beyond your life.
And me? I’m not doing anything.
I’m not helping or cleaning.
I’m not even crying.
I’m not doing anything.
She’d be so goddamn helpful.
Well, fuck her for dying ’cause I – I’m not writing her elegy.
Not me.
I’m not writing that down.
They would scrawl her name on a city wall but I’m a fucking clown.
I’m making jokes so I don’t drown.
They say write something that scares you. Saying “fuck her” scared me. I worried it would alienate the audience but you say things like that when you’re grieving – especially when you tell yourself you’re not grieving.
I remember a friend of mine telling me how much our friend’s death didn’t bother her because they’d fallen out a year before. Does she even remember saying that? It was the guilt talking. Even if you don’t say it, you think terrible things when someone dies. The inconvenience of their timing, how you saw it coming when you can only see that in retrospect. You are guilty in the fact of your own inertia, be it the commuter eating an apple; the leach on a funeral, smoking a cigarette because you can’t deal. You live inside the sensation that you have never contributed, that you may never contribute. You survived – the one who had nothing to give – and the other person (future astronomer, social justice lawyer, red cross volunteer) died. If roles were reversed, she would be inside the house making other people feel better. She would comfort the grievers. You – right now, yesterday, and tomorrow – you are doing nothing. Talk about self-loathing.
I was never the best friend, the sister, the mother. I was ten feet away and I was shaken. In the months that followed, I kept thinking about their actual best friend, their siblings. I don’t know what that feels like. But even ten feet away, I felt this seismic shift in who I was. What would be like to feel that every day in the grooves of your routine? I thought about that a lot.
I didn’t want to write about grief. I had to write about grief. Because I could. Because after seeing The Mad Ones, after hearing this song, people grab me by the arm and ask me who I know who died. They have tears in their eyes and I know that they lost someone and this feels true to them and that means something.
At the moment when someone dies, you don’t want to talk about it, or feel it, or deal with it. You don’t want to write about it. You want to avoid it because you’re afraid that if you name it, you will be consumed by it.
By naming the great fear that you will drown, you give into the sensation you’ve been fighting. You let it wash over you.
I feel like I’m underwater. I feel like I’m underwater.
I feel like I’m underwater.
I feel like I’m underwater. Like the whole world is underwater.
Like I’m screaming out underwater.
I feel like I’m underwater these days Anyways.
“Anyways” is a perverse attempt at recovery, of pretending none of that happened. You didn’t start to drown; you weren’t gulping for air. You’re fine. You’re making a joke. You’re rhyming, goddammit.
It doesn’t work. It falls so flat.
Anyway.
The final restart. This is real. This is what you should have said, what you couldn’t have said when you started. This is what you mean.
I didn’t expect to see you here. I mean – thanks for coming.
I thought you’d oppose the use of religious rites as numbing.
I mean – it is dumb.
But what if she can hear them pray?
I mean what the fuck do we know?
Who are we to say?
If there was any way.
Any way.
I told you this wouldn’t be personal. I lied. Everything’s personal.
Have you read A Year in Magical Thinking? I recommend it. Joan Didion wrote it after her husband died suddenly. She’s a master memoirist and so when she turned her lens on such a personal subject matter she’s skilled enough to write something beautiful and restrained. She wrote:
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”
Each time I’ve experienced a death, I’ve had a sensation of cognitive dissonance. I know in my brain that the person is dead, but my heart’s slow to respond. Another friend of mine died this summer. He wasn’t my closest friend. I was ten, even 20 feet away. He was incandescent. Everyone had experienced some unforgettable night where he stared into their soul. We’d had several. He flattered me by meeting up several times to work up a project together. It never got off the ground but just the other day, I had the impulse to share a new thought that might break it open before I remembered that I would never be able to tell him.
I don’t believe in a god. I think your body and soul are intertwined. Nothing magic happens when you die. My friends aren’t haunting the ghost lights of America. But at the same time, I have the humility to hope I’m wrong.
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