A song is a key for locked memory boxes. A song can transport you back through time, giving you a chance to relive moments and ideas that occurred back when you first heard that song. A song is not just a song; it is also a story.

All good children ask “Why?” – especially when it comes to why they should be good at all. My parents were extremely Christian – are, I should say – and so my earliest remembrance of a conversation involves me wondering if you would be allowed to kill yourself in heaven, because wouldn’t you be so bored? I’m being like a hundred percent serious. At the end of all my why-ing was a “because” I could never accept. It took me ‘til I was eighteen, feminist-curious and desperately in first love, though, to actually get out of there.

It was the early 2000s and we listened to a lot of emo, my brother and I, because emo people understood all our pre-sex frustrations. I don’t know who told me about Bright Eyes. My brother’s friend, I think. I fell hard. Not for the friend. He was cute, but no. Bright Eyes was the sound of everything scratching and whining at me from the inside all the time, just like these feral cage-rattling emotional needs. And then this one song, which seemed more like intellectual. I went on SongMeanings to find out for sure. That seems cute to me now. Do we still assume songs have meanings and/or would we admit to not getting it? Anyway, I was right in that it was about the non-existence of God and existential helplessness. I printed it out in the computer lab on campus and took it home and memorized every word of it, and of other (Conor) Oberst songs, my new scriptures.

*Note that Oberst was not giving a fuck about the Oxford Comma long before those other guys.

- Sarah Nicole Prickett, Writer for FASHION Magazine, Toronto Standard and National Post