One Day You'll Be Back
the challenge of recommending, or even celebrating, minor successes (feat. a lot of footnotes about Star Wars)
The Song
Title: The Indigo Child (Reprise)
Artist: The Dear Hunter, feat. Tivoli
Album: The Indigo Child
Year: 2021
The Story
How much success is required within a project for the project itself to be considered a success? If half of an album’s tracks are bona fide bangers but the other half are filler, is it a good album?1 If the first few seasons of a show are masterful, but the last few seasons fall apart, was it an artistically successful show?2 The alchemy here is complicated, and you can get as granular as you like—consider a single word choice or an isolated melodic interval—the only limitation being how small a piece you’re willing to parcel out, examine, and then ask yourself, “How much did I enjoy that?”
The first act of Star Wars: The Force Awakens,3 for example, is delightful.4 There’s top-tier world-building, table-setting, and character development, and I just want the story to keep tracking these plucky kids,5 but then the plot devolves into a litany of clumsy callbacks and, even worse, a meta-commentary on the Star Wars franchise as a whole.6 Pivoting to literature, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is famous for its opening line,7 but the book itself is mostly a middling war story, until its final few pages elevate the narrative to another realm entirely. With its poetry, rhythm, and heart-breaking earnestness, I would list the concluding section of Tale among the handful of greatest passages ever written.
As a critic, what do you do with opinions like this? Maybe you suggest watching the first act of The Force Awakens as a short film and reading the conclusion of Tale as a short story. Maybe you avoid discussing them altogether. Maybe you reevaluate whether or not you need to think and talk about art all the time, actually.8 I don’t know! Art is complex and complexity demands nuance and nuance is hard. But it can also be worth it. I’m one of those people who finds so much meaning and value in art that a brilliant passage, even a short one buried in nondescript environs, feels worthy of being lifted up and celebrated.
And so, dear reader, I recommend to you the outro of “The Indigo Child (Reprise),” a six-minute song that is passable for four minutes and excellent for two.9 Released on what is essentially the soundtrack for a non-existent movie,10 “The Indigo Child (Reprise)” is mostly a dreamy, lightly psychedelic track featuring the serene vocals of Tivoli Crescenzo, spouse of TDH-mastermind Casey. And then the song kicks into its outro, this groovy little loop built around a few basic patterns and a fantastic melodic line, and it’s so perfect that I just want it to carry on for thirty minutes unbroken. That would have been easier to recommend, or at least I could have made the recommendation with fewer footnotes about Star Wars.
I give the totality of “The Indigo Child (Reprise)” three out of five stars, but its outro gets a perfect score.
What album sprang to mind for you here? I’m legitimately curious. Leave yours in the comments. I’ll go first: Eisley’s Currents. If they had released tracks three through six—“Drink the Water,” “Save My Soul,” “Millstone,” and “Real World”—as an EP, it would be arguably the band’s strongest release. The rest of the album does little for me. If I had to render a binary verdict, I’d say that four great songs out of twelve isn’t enough and that Currents isn’t a good album. (Can I hedge and say it’s fine? That’s the word. It’s fine.)
Hit the comments again with this one. I’m guessing more than a few of you are thinking of Game of Thrones since that one seemed to cut a lot of people rather deeply. (I read the first two books but gave up on the show when my HBO subscription expired after Season 1, so I don’t quite share your pain.) My knee-jerk reaction would be Lost. What an unbelievable first season, and what unsatisfying concluding ones.
Everything before Han arrives.
I’m sure there are a million other examples I could have gone with here, many of them more effective than this one. I picked The Force Awakens solely because I’ve been listening to a lot of the Blank Check podcast lately, and given that show’s focus on Star Wars, it’s been top of mind. This is the one brain I have, people.
A feeling the original Star Wars also evoked! Arguably a huge part of why people loved that movie so much!
I’d actually argue that the sequel trilogy was doomed from its literal first moment: the opening scrawl of The Force Awakens. Those few paragraphs act as a reset button on the Star Wars universe, undoing all the work of the original trilogy and setting the stage for another battle between evil imperialists and the under-manned do-gooders who hope to overthrow them. That’s a good story idea, but it was already told in the original trilogy! The first act of The Force Awakens is still excellent, but largely because of its focus on establishing the three new series leads. That character development makes for good storytelling isn’t a revelation but it is, apparently, easily forgotten. If the sequels actually let the past be the past, instead of just preaching about the concept as mostly meta-commentary in The Last Jedi, all three films could have been very interesting. Rather than the convoluted retconning we got, I’d have very much enjoyed seeing the stories of Rey, Finn, and Poe evolving as natural arcs from that first act introduction.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
Nah, that’d be nuts.
The quality stuff begins at 4:24 of the song’s 6:17 runtime.