Overboard and Down

One day I'd been out buying a shovel and a pH testing kit and I heard The President's Dead on the radio. Rapid fire narrative, cheap trick emotions, it has no right to work. But as with most of what Okkervil River offers it works wonderfully.

I only bought the song tonight, tracked it down after months of fitful searches. $10 for a song, well five songs but I was only buying it with certainty for the opening cut. The four others are fine but not as immediate as President with its imagining of Kennedy's head buckling as "black dressed agents" move fast to a dead man. Not that the song is necessarily about Jack, it's more about the phrase "the President's dead' and what happens on the day it's first stuttered and by day's end typed in 72 point print. Will Sheff sings the words forcefully, there is no disbelief in his repetition or his story when he talks about "lying in bed with my girlfriend" until he heard "three words they said, like three shots to my head, the President's dead".

It gives thought as well, in the context of now, to that Obama factoid of his secret service detail being the largest of any nominee.

The first time I heard the song it seemed so much longer than it's 2:42 minutes. Hearing good songs for the first time is always a chance to slow the space time continuum, to catch breath and always to go to another place. To remove myself from the worry of having spent too much on my steel shovel, to ignore the fucking idiot refusing to use indicators when changing lanes on the Parkway, to smile.