Fall Songs - Part Two

On hearts, hands, pockets, and night-driving (featuring Mazzy Star, Iron & Wine, and The Salty Dogs)

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I begin anticipating the moment I can break out the fall playlist around sometime in July. To definitively mark such anticipation, I begin to tweak and tinker with it. But before said tweaking and tinkering (twinkering?) commences, I first copy and paste the songs from last year’s playlist (“Fall 2024”) into a new playlist for this year (“Fall 2025”). I started this tradition in 2022, and so I have a record of the specifics of my twinkering with the Fall Playlist going on three years now. Some years, certain songs need to be removed—sometimes, in a fit of compulsivity, I will think, “This isn’t a fall song! Why did I put this on here?” and delete it in haste—and always new songs need to be added. One could say I’m fairly passionate about music, but fall takes that passion, I willingly confess, to the level of obsession.

Last year I wrote about seven of my favorite songs to listen to during the contradictory season of graying skies and colors that pop. I enjoyed the exercise, and immensely enjoyed the result, which in various turns ended up being personal, anecdotal, reflective, poetic, and filled with not entirely banal descriptions of the songs contained therein. Perhaps I am only amusing myself; I am okay with that. This year, as autumn has been slowly approaching like congealed honey running along the side of a jar, I’ve decided to write about a few more of my favorite songs for the season. My aim is for these written ponderings to be a cross between genuine music appreciation and the delightfully—possibly absurdly, certainly poetically—experimental, and in the form of multiple posts each containing musings on three or four songs. With that said, happy fall. May these songs content the restless parts within us as the earth begins to die its beautiful death. Let’s get weird.

“Fade Into You” - Mazzy Star

Without Mazzy Star and the dreamy, rapturous vocals of Hope Sandoval, exemplified in the ageless “Fade Into You,” would there be a Lana Del Rey? Would Taylor Swift have embarked upon her Folklore era, which, in this humble writer’s opinion, just happens to contain her most resonant and affecting songs? We will never know with certainty, but I’m going to go ahead and emphatically say “no.” It is with no small amount of shame that I must admit I don’t know many of Mazzy Star’s songs beyond this one (I know a couple, though, and they’ve only released four albums in a thirty-five year career), but I also don’t know of a band that has one song that has been so influential to the musical stylings of others, not to mention pop culture in general. In 2013, Vulture even called it the most overused song in film and television. It’s appeared in recent shows like Dopesick (phenomenal) and Virgin River (haven’t watched, never will). I am almost certain I first heard it in the 1997 cinematic classic Starship Troopers—starring Denise Richards, Casper Van Dien, and Gary Busey’s son—which a high school buddy covertly brought to school one day for me to borrow (there were, shall we say, certain scenes that piqued the interest of teenage boys).

The song opens with unhurried acoustic strums and resonant bass, but it’s when the languid three-note slide guitar is previewed nine seconds in that you will think, “I’ve heard this song. I love this song.” Following that, particularly if it’s a cool autumn night, you will also think, “Please inject this song into my veins so that it courses through my body for remainder of the season.” Those three notes repeat throughout and somehow sound like falling tears and forming rainbows at the exact same time. They sound like mid-fall’s vibrant beauty and the relentless gray of fall’s demise. Sandoval’s vocals aren’t so much wildly desperate or passionate as they are filled with longing and deeply, resignedly broken. She doesn’t need to sell her desperation or her passion by over-singing. “I wanna take the breath that’s true,” she sings, and singing is just a form of breathing, leaving her exposed.

“I wanna hold the hand inside you” is the opening line. Holding hands the usual way is not enough. She wants closeness, intimacy with the object of her affection. Holding hands the usual way would be unbearable, would involve too much distance. She wants to interlock fingers with the ventricles of someone’s heart, and fade into them. “Fade Into You” is Hope Sandoval fading into us every time we hear the song, our hearts ripped out and beating in her hands. It occurs to me now that veins in the human body resemble thin tree branches after all the leaves have let go. It occurs to me now that some red leaves look like hearts.

(I’d be remiss if I glossed over a recent interview in which JD Vance mentions “Fade Into You” as one of his favorite songs. And the more I think about it, this information does not anger me so much as baffle me. You cannot be full of as much smarmily impassioned vitriol as he is and claim five of the most transcendent minutes in all of recorded music as being actually meaningful to you. The emotion the song exudes cannot resonate if you are void of authentic emotion. Hope Sandoval cannot hold your heart in her hands if you are heartless.)

“Bird Stealing Bread” - Iron & Wine

I did not get Iron & Wine at first, which is to say I did not get Sam Beam, the man behind the moniker, at first. I’m not sure exactly what it was—I didn’t like his voice, thought the music was trying to be, I don’t know, too cutesy-soft-hipster-folk?—but it produced a visceral negative reaction in me for a number of years.

Iron & Wine exploded in popularity (indie popularity at least) with its second album, Our Endless Numbered Days, but I never could get on board, even as Paste magazine, one of the in-print tastemakers of the day, tried its best to pull me in. I also had a friend who was an avowed Sam Beam evangelist try to bring me into the fold. He bought me 2007’s The Shepherd’s Dog—in which Beam stretches beyond his whisper-folk parameters, at least as far as production goes—as a kind of final attempt. The fuller sound, he thought, might help sway me. And to an extent it did move the needle, what with lead single, the downright chipper (for Beam) “Boy With a Coin” and the hauntingly beautiful “Resurrection Fern,” wherein the lilting, almost child-like earnestness of Beam’s voice first dug its hushed claws into my heart. Not much of the rest of the album connected, but those two songs did. About time.

And then one day, the fall I’d moved in with my Iron & Wine-loving friend, Beam’s debut album, 2002’s The Creek Drank the Cradle, just clicked, like a seatbelt I’d been trying to fasten for years. That was fall of 2008, and it was my second to last semester of college, so I suppose I was feeling all the things a twentysomething feels when they are on the cusp of leaving behind one world and crossing over into another: excitement and optimism, to be sure, for what lies ahead, but also not a small amount of self-doubt and sadness.

The album cover for The Creek Drank the Cradle, the burnt orange silhouette of a tree against a golden brown backdrop, practically screams (softly, though, as Beam would have it) at the listener, “Play me during autumn.” And I did. I do. It didn’t take me long to come to the conclusion that this had to be one of the great debut albums in history. There is a warmth to it, a coziness, as if Beam were playing for you in his living room, offering to fetch a sweater or get a fire going if the chill becomes too much. And this is by design; Beam recorded the album to cassette tape on a 4-track recorder, as if he’d casually pulled the equipment and his guitar out from underneath his bed and pushed the button with the red circle as a matter of course. I let Sam Beam sing me to sleep multiple times that fall; it’s one of the first albums I can recall listening to as I drifted off to slumber. It was medicine, but not so much sleep aid as balm, a whispered comfort that quelled the fires threatening to engulf my mind, enabling rest.

I have fixated on multiple songs from the album over the years, but no doubt “Bird Stealing Bread” is the one I come back to the most. A persistent theme for some years of my life was unrequited love, and as you might expect, this is what “Bird Stealing Bread” is about. Or, at the very least, love that has passed you by. I recall driving the streets at night blasting its two or three chords on repeat, imagining my pining would one day be reciprocated. But now, looking back, I have to believe that, deep down, I knew it wasn’t in the cards, for Beam’s song is nothing if not an acceptance of one’s fate as lovelorn. From the beginning, the strokes Beam brushes his song with are laced with wistful sadness as the narrator looks through pictures, imagines things he and his beloved used to do together, imagines she is actually there, wanting to hear him spill his heart.

Said heart spillage comes through a series of potent and poetic questions about the man she is now with, which throughout the song become evidence that our narrator’s hope and pride, while viscerally damaged, haven’t been completely eviscerated. The first: “Does his company make / light of a rainy day?” I always thought that was an incredibly poetic way to say “This dude sucks.” The implication is strong that the little things this guy does not do or is not good at will add up, and resentment will set in, and then regret. The second question: “Do his hands in your hair / feel a lot like a thing you believe in? / Or a bit like a bird / stealing bread out from under your nose?” Simple acts say so much; they can give clues as to one’s trustworthiness or lack thereof. The narrator believes, or wants to believe, this dude who’s bad company is just using her to get what he wants.

Up to this point, the questions have an air of, “You made your choice, you live with it,” but the final question is the kicker, the one that lets you know the pain still cuts: “Do you carry the words / around like a key or change?” It’s such a unique and intimate image. I desired for my unrequited love—loves; as a twentysomething introvert, there were several; I suppose crushes is a more accurate word—to think of me in this way, to carry around our conversations in her pocket, always there, her fingers happening upon them every so often throughout the day—reminders of me. I admit it can all sound very sad and depressing, but the beauty is in the catharsis, the created fact of the song. And in the fact of the song’s existence as creative expression, the depression gets to be redeemed, for both creator and listener. That’s the power of music. Sam Beam got me through some hard times.

One of the tragic things about fall is that if it rains too hard at the wrong time, when leaves are hanging on by wisps, the water can wring them off the trees prematurely, all at once, cutting our enjoyment of the season’s beauty down early, portending the coming gray perpetuity. Thankfully, we have Iron & Wine to keep us good company, to make light of those rainy autumn days.

“Another Day In A Small Town” - The Salty Dogs

In the same way the world changes from cozy and lovely to dark and desolate over the arc of autumn, small towns have taken a similar trajectory over the arc of the last half century or so. I love hearing stories about the small Kentucky towns my mom and dad grew up in, Dad in Williamsburg and Mom in Cumberland (Harlan County), stories full of a kind of life I could only imagine and characters that shared my blood. As a younger man I overly romanticized these stories and the places they sprung from. They were like wildflowers in my mind, and that’s all I could see; I was ignorant of the weeds of corporate greed, economic hardship, lack of opportunity, and the wholesale degradation and desecration of land and natural resources that had befallen so many of these communities over time.

In my ignorance it was easy for me to imagine that, if given the chance, I would be one to depart from the typical narrative of “get out of here when you can.” It was easy for me to condescendingly think, “Why would someone ever want to leave a place like that?” Of course, there are reasons to stay, but age and maturity have showed me there are probably just a many reasons for people to want to leave, and, until lots of things change, often those reasons have a stronger pull. The Salty Dogs’ “Another Day In A Small Town” is about someone who stayed, someone who’s “wearing cement shoes” and “living in the small town sand.” This narrator isn’t going anywhere, even if he wanted to, and he’s mostly content with the decision, but perhaps the older he gets that contentment is ever-so-slightly tinged with more and more thoughts of what if. I first heard the song on the perilously underrated TV show Rectify, fittingly about, among other things, both the desire to stay and the desire to escape an ever-evolving, ever-homogenizing, ever-loving small town, where sometimes it’s great to know everybody, but sometimes it’s a pain in the ass.

“Another Day In A Small Town” is sung over simple countrified production and a dirge-like melody. It includes the sneakily incisive line, “There’s nothing to do on a lonely Friday night / except drive to the end of town / and turn around at the Church of Christ.” And I can imagine my foot as the one on the gas, driving around the unsprawling streets of anywhere America, the gray autumn twilight giving way to starless dark. I may be alone, but I am not wholly lonely. As an only child I got used to being alone, learned how to turn the loneliness into solitude. I learned how to utilize that alone time to read and listen to music and think too much. I reveled in pondering. I became a professional brooder. And so while this line is likely meant to convey crippling boredom and a narrow-way future, sometimes when I hear it, it is aspirational. I want to be that person. I want to drive up and down the main strip of a town cradled by mountains, chilled by the autumn air pouring in the window I’m too stubborn to roll up, and I want to turn in at the church marquee with the bad pun about “harvesting souls.” While I know that it’s easy for and perhaps ignorant of me to romanticize small-town life—that this is perhaps a callous imaginative exercise—I have to say I wouldn’t hate taking on the life of the supposedly bored small-town loner with limited capitalistic opportunity in order to wake up on an October morning in the shadow of a mountain painted with the beaming colors of fall.

(An aside: I have recommended Rectify to several people, most of whom report back that it’s really good, but they couldn’t continue watching because it was too depressing. Which, yes, is true. I tried to get my wife to watch it with me, and she said the same thing. Okay, fine, I get it. But it also contains a smattering of stunningly transcendent moments that I don’t recall ever seeing in fictional television before. I’m talking heartrending, weep-inducing moments of raw beauty and emotion. And so I now appropriately recognize, what with the elegant melancholy of it all, that if Rectify encapsulated the feeling of a season, it would doubtless be the feeling of fall.)

Check out part one here: