Riding Around in the Dark— Florist

#365Songs: May 22nd

I read Cormac McCarthy’s bleak-as-fuck The Road for the first time during the early pandemic months, back when we all expected to die. As with many of my entertainment choices, this was unwise. That’s the thing about dystopian art: it’s all smoldering villages, masked gangs carrying homemade weapons named Thundersticks, sinewy zombies chomping the noses off your favorite characters, while burying us within those early days after a nuclear apocalypse when the dusty, dopey-eyed survivors assess what little remains.

But perhaps there’s also beauty at the end of the world.

The one unburnt flower in a fire-ravaged forest, a small community of neighbors sharing food on a floating vessel in a flooded city, a dreamer driving a bug-carcassed beater down a desert highway as the world ends in the rearview mirror. That’s the way I want to spend my apocalypse: in a melancholic and nostalgic state of ‘I don’t give a fuck’ barreling down the open road with only the past ahead of me.

As I’ve prepared for my “soundtrack for the end of the world” theme week, I’ve contemplated all sorts of different flavors and moods. It’s quite surprising how many dystopian songs hide behind catchy, upbeat rhythms.

To quote the great Tom Waits, “I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”

The band Florist debuted almost ten years ago, and have released a series of truly lovely, introspective albums that definitively check all the boxes for “sad songs.” On their 2019 album, Emily Alone, lead singer Emily Sprague contemplates grief and trauma in ways that map directly to my own journey, to my own writing over the past decade and a half.

For those of you who know me well, or have read a post or two, it won’t be a surprise to hear that I run to sad, lyrical music. I fall into a state of bliss, peace, introspection when lost in someone else’s contemplations, reflections, and heartbreaks. Towards the middle of my mid-day run the other day, I must’ve reached the end of my playlist because it played a suggested song, Florist’s Riding Around in the Dark off the soundtrack for the film, I Saw the TV Glow. I played it on repeat for the final few miles.

Stop dreaming, what’s your weakness?
I’m not dearly loved
By the hands that know me
Knives that throw me now
It’s the end of the world
And we’re driving around
It’s the end of the world
And we’re driving around

In a press release, lead singer Emily Sprague wrote: “Reading the script for I Saw The TV Glow immediately took me back to my own teenage years — growing up in a small town, never feeling like I belonged, and being obsessed with the liminal spaces between fiction and reality. I used to drive around at night and soak in these coming-of-age emotional tidal waves, dreaming about the world beyond my doorstep while simultaneously feeling a sense of ominous darkness. I wanted to try capturing that feeling in our song for the film. In many ways, it defines what being young meant to me, believing that the world is ending but somehow still living in it.”

I felt that way then, too, in my own version of a small town, in that isolated way in which we dream alone about broader worlds while battling the fears that claw to hold us back. I drive the way I run, less of an escape than a passing of time, the blurring of one place with another. As I’ve gotten older, and as I’ve begun to process the world my kid is inheriting, I feel that same unease I felt during more innocent times. The dark is getting darker — fires and floods, genocides and pandemics, capitalism’s savage inequalities, an inevitable AI takeover, and the divisive politics barreling us towards a preventable Fascist regime. These are the times that prologue those dystopian novels and films, the ‘what ifs’ and ‘we should have’ moments that could’ve prevented what comes next.

Shoot out the light from across the road
You know the things that I said in the parking lot
You know the things that I say in the dark
Eyes turning, light burning
And I’m far from gone
And the deepest feelings
Faces come and go
It’s the end of the world

What do we do as the world turns, burns, and breaks us? Do we scream into the void, do we gather in the streets with signs and torches, do we tape sticks and forks together to protect ourselves from the gangs gathering in the shadows, do we drive down empty roads hoping to outrun the inevitable?

Whether the end of the world is lifetimes away or just around the corner, we’re here now, living in the cracks between what is and what will be. What better way to spend that time than driving towards the light that still remains. I’m with Florist on this one. For now, at least.

And I’m riding around
It’s the end of the world
And I’m riding around
Shoot out the sun from across the moon
You know the things that I do in the dark
I’ll always be a part of your thoughts

~

Start following the #365Songs playlist today, and listen to each new song with each new article!