100 Pop Songs Every Catholic Should Hear #2 "The Graveyard Near the House" by The Airborne Toxic Event

Ash Wednesday falls on Valentine’s day this year, a fairly rare occurrence. In fact, it will only happen one more time in our lifetime, in 2029. After that, it will be nearly 150 years until it happens again. If you were looking for a song to play for your beloved this Ash Valentine’s day to tell them you’ve been thinking about how much you love them…and how we all return to dust, well, you are in luck with this week’s “Pop Song Every Catholic Should Hear.”

The Graveyard Near the House
The Airborne Toxic Event

The other day when we were walking by the graveyard near the house, you asked me if I thought we would ever die
And if life and love both fade so predictably, we've made ourselves a kind of predictable lie
And so I pictured us like corpses, lying side by side in pieces in some dark and lonely plot under a bough
We looked so silly there, all decomposed, half turned to dust in tattered clothes
Though we probably look just as silly now

Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye to all this dogged innocence
I can't pretend that I can tell you what is going to happen next or how to be
But you have no idea about me
Do you?

And it left me to wonder if people ever know each other or just stumble around like strangers in the dark
Cause sometimes you seem so strange to me, and I must seem strange to you
We're like two actors playing our parts
Did you memorize your lines? Cause I did
Here's the part where I get so mad, I tell you, "I can't forget the past"
You get so quiet now, and you seem somehow like a lost and lonely child
And you just hope that the moment won't last

Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye to all this dogged innocence
I can't pretend that I can tell you what is going to happen next or how to be
But you have no idea about me
You have no idea about me
Do you?

Still, there's always a way around, there's something tying our feet to the ground
A moment passed, we hear how it sounds
Then it seems a little less profound
Like we're all going the same way down, yeah, we're all going the same way down
I'm just trying to write it all down

Cause I write songs, and you write letters
We are tied like two in tethers
And we talk and read and laugh and sleep at night in bed together
And you wake in tears sometimes, I can see the thoughts flash across your eyes
They say, "Darling will you be kind? Will you be a good man and stay behind if I get old?"

And then the letters all pass through my head with the words that I was told
About the fading flesh of life and love, the failures of the bold
I can list each crippling fear like I'm reading from a will

And I'll defy every one and love you still
I will carry you with me up every hill
And if you die before I die, I'll carve your name out of the sky
I'll fall asleep with your memory and dream of where you lie

It may be better to move on and to let life just carry on
And I may be wrong
Still, I'll try

Cause it's better to love whether you win or lose or die
It's better to love whether you win or lose or die
It's better to love and I will love you until I die

The lyrics from today’s song come to us from The Airborne Toxic Event lead singer Mikel Jollett. Jollett recently said, “If we were having a creative family sadness contest, I’m winning.” He’s not wrong. Jollett was born into the infamous “Synanon” cult. Technically, this cult would not be considered a satanic cult, in that its members did not literally worship Satan, or perform satanic rituals. However, the cult did continue the work that Satan started in Eden—breaking families apart. Synanon, like Moloch, demanded child sacrifices. Parents were required to hand over their children “at six months old to be raised by strangers.”

No marriages.

No mothers.

No fathers.

The children would speak to each other in hushed whispers, asking each other what these words meant.

From this devastating brokenness, our songwriter hails, but as we’ll see, that brokenness need not be the end of our story.

This is the fundamental question that the lover asks of her beloved, and which must be answered. Ultimately, this is the fear of every broken heart—and every heart is broken in some way — “will we ever die?” Not will “I” die, or will “you” die, but will “we” die. In other words, will there no longer be an “us?” Will we go on—but not as “we?”

Let us abandon any false romanticism here and speak only the truth, which is this: true lovers desire above all else for their love to be an eternal one.

And yet.

We are broken-hearted and therefore we doubt our worthiness to receive this love. And so, the lover here asks her beloved whether all loves are ultimately as fated as life itself, so that the desire for an eternal love is ultimately a “predictable lie.”

Her beloved has a somewhat macabre vision:

One wonders why the lovers look “just as silly now” as they would when they are half turned to dust? I think the answer is, just as their bodies are broken and battered in the grave, so their hearts are broken and battered by the wounds of the past. If one could see their hearts and souls, perhaps one would see tears and tatters, and wounds upon wounds in need of healing.

The beloved though is, nevertheless, taken aback by his lover’s question to him.

For a moment, he himself wonders whether lovers can really know each other, or are they “like two actors playing our parts.” This calls to mind of course Shakespeare, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.” And if it is the case that the lovers are merely actors playing their parts, then the graveyard really is all that there is in the end. They will become, as Shakespeare concludes, “mere oblivion; Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

For the married couple, replaying these “scenes” with each other, without stopping to truly listen to the other is what leads “us” to sans everything.

And yet.

We are broken, so not only do we sometimes see the beloved as an actor, but we see ourselves as one too.

Perhaps it is easier to remember the wounds of our past, than it is to hope for the scars of our future.

At this point in the narrative, the lovers have shared their wounds with each other. Although he has felt wounded by her question, and questions whether “she has any idea about him,” she does not retaliate. Instead:

Although he was initially wounded by her question to him, he finally realizes that her question was not doubting his ability to love, but rather she is doubting her worthiness to receive his love.

There is no more tragic scene played out within a marriage than this one: a woman questions whether her husband truly loves her, and her husband perceives it as an attack on himself. Then, the husband defends himself, when he ought to have defended his wife, for it is toward her that this doubt is directed. For the doubt is not “do you love me” but “ought you love me?” There is, perhaps, no more devastating question.

Here, because the woman responds with innocent love, “like a lonely child,” they both quickly recover and remember who they are.

Still, there's always a way around…
A moment passed, we hear how it sounds. Then it seems a little less profound.

As soon as those lyrics begin, the construction of the song itself changes. The drummer begins a series of stick clicks, reminiscent of a heartbeat that will continue unabated until the song’s completion. At the same time, a lone viola begins to play in harmony.

Finally, the man truly understands where the fear comes from. And he recalls:

They are tied like two in tethers because they are bound by vows to each of other. And so, they share their entire lives together, talking, reading, laughing, and sleeping. But sometimes before our eyes, the doubtful phantoms fly. The man realizes his beloved has seen these phantoms in her nightmares, and he at last understands the thoughts and tears in her eyes: is this tether tied forever? What if she loses her beauty as she gets old? "Will he be [a] kind…good man and stay behind?”

“Will I be a good man and stay behind?” Every man entering into marriage ought to ask himself that very question. Note that this is a question ultimately asked by the man, and not his beloved, as he merely intuits the “thoughts across [her] eyes.”

The fear that the man and woman share is ultimately the same fear reflected in the doubts each have about themselves. She fears that all love might be a “predictable lie” because she is unworthy; he fears fulfilling the prophecy through weakness and his inability to love her as she ultimately truly does deserve.

It is sadly the case that many of the loudest voices in our society proclaim that marriages ultimately fade as sure as life itself. We are told, over and over, about marriages that ended in tragedy, which is of course the same as simply saying: they ended. “The failures of the bold”—those who were willing, at one time, to believe in a life-long marriage, are held up for ridicule.

The man and woman who happily spend 50 years together in wedded bliss are never deemed newsworthy by the wise newspaper editors of The World. The lead headline of The World is that divorce is the inevitable outcome: for infidelity; for immaturity; for his faults; for her faults; for no fault.

Those are the “crippling fears” that we all can recite like “reading from a will.” How do we defy these fears? How do we become good men and women? St. Thomas Aquinas was posed the same question by his sister, and he gave the answer: “Will it.” St. Francis De Sales gives the same answer when he says, “As by studying we learn how to study, and speaking teaches us how to speak, running how to run, working how to work, thus does loving teach us how to love…”

How to defy these crippling fears? Resolve to. Will it. The lover tells the beloved:

Ultimately, the lover defies every fear because his beloved deserves nothing less than his total gift of self—to the very end of all things. Though none of us can bear the wounds or fears of our beloved, we can, like Samwise, bear the beloved. “I will carry you with me up every hill.” Each of us faces a journey to Calvary. Sometimes we are privileged enough to walk with another. And when they are too wounded to continue, we are honored to take them in our arms and tell them, “You have walked a long way today. Rest now awhile. I have you.”

At end of the song, we return to the graveyard. The lover tells his beloved

Teenage lovers often carve their names into a tree. Perhaps young love needs a physical medium to carve remembrances on; it allows the lovers to return to the living canvas so that they can remember their young love as vividly as the day they wrote it. But perhaps mature love no longer needs a physical medium, nor indeed even the beloved’s physical presence to recall the lifetime of love they have lived together. In the end, the name of the beloved can be carved anywhere, and everywhere. Yes, even “out of the sky.” This memory, this love, is so strong, that it carries him even in dreams back to “the graveyard near the house” so that he lies still, once again, with his beloved.

The lyrics here are a play on the phrase “win, lose, or tie,” to illustrate that marriage ends only one way. It doesn’t end by someone winning, or someone losing. No, it ends by death, and death alone. There may be days when you pass by the graveyard near the house and forget that one day, many years before, there was a moment when you bent a knee, took a deep breath, and removed a small box from your pocket. You may forget that on that day, you held a ring and proclaimed to your beloved, “I will carry you with me up every hill.” In sickness. In health. For richer. For poorer. Win or lose. Every hill. That’s the choice. That’s the privilege.

The song asserts, like Tennyson in his poem In Memoriam: “I hold it true, whate'er befall; / I feel it, when I sorrow most; / 'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.”

What is lost is not love, but the beloved, and then only for a time, for Love ultimately conquers death itself.

Mikel Jollett wrote these lyrics while mourning the death of his grandparents—who were married for 72 years. Reflecting on his own marriage he says:

Our wedding day was a beautiful promise, but I think I became a husband not by wearing a tuxedo and reciting those breathless lines but later when I was able, finally, to add new features to the landscape of my mind: a quiet stream of patience and acceptance, a shady grove for tolerating the fear that once prompted me to run, an open valley of forgiveness, loyalty, belief in her and, above all else, a warm field we try to visit every day, joy. I love my wife with a deep passion, but after a short time I realized that the heart of marriage is an epic friendship.

Jollett came from a place of deep brokenness, but marriage is one way that we, the brokenhearted, begin to be mended.

But this should not surprise us. We all carry wounds and brokenness, but what a joy, what a gift, to remember that one place where we remain unbroken, is in the bond that joins us to our beloved.

For, in all the world, there is nothing that can join two broken things together to form an unbreakable bond between them—except marriage.

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