oh, you know i'm still afraid
Disclaimer: Today’s essay is an examination of the tension that comes from being a sober person who still loves drinking songs and while I make every effort to avoid assigning anything resembling glory to the drinking that I used to do - here and in life - I am also a person whose tolerance for thinking about drinking and not drinking varies from day to day and know that like with all things in life, that’s something I’m not alone in. Be kind to yourself. If you’d rather skip all that and dance to a playlist that was made for moving instead of sitting around and thinking, by all means, do that. You can try this one.
I have had Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” stuck in my head for months at this point. On its surface the song is an uncomplicated if punishingly catchy song about drinking that’s got a beat that’s easy to clap or stomp along to and a chorus that invites finger counting and karaoke from even the most reluctant of public singers.
But the surface is nearly never everything and if you watch the video for the song you’ll see in the delivery that there might be little more something going on.
Or, on the off chance that this unexpected depth was projected vs. in the text, for me - a person with five years of sobriety in the rear view who still has days where I’m white-knuckling the steering wheel as I sing along - there is still nothing remotely uncomplicated about having had a drinking song stuck in my head for weeks.
There is a note in my phone from 2022 that says only “It’s five o’clock somewhere at 6:52 am and my relationship with drinking songs” and from the time stamp, I can reasonably assume that I wrote it from an Uber that was playing Jimmy Buffett on the way to an early morning flight and had thoughts I wanted to make sure I remembered to think sometime when I was more awake and more up to the task.
A couple years earlier, I’d written something along the lines of “What will it mean when I finally stop loving drinking songs, and what does it say about me if I never do?” I can no longer make guesses as to where I was and what I was doing when I thought that it was worth jotting down because sometime in the years that have gone by I decided that I didn’t have the strength to ponder that question every time I opened up the notes app to make a grocery list.
All of which is to say that I have been thinking about this for a long time, am thinking about it more often than I actually think about drinking sometimes, and am finally ready to unpack that question in the only way I really know how - through other people’s songs.
The thing about drinking was that sometimes it was stupidly simple. For me it was deeply stupid, but often very simple. Untangling that fact and learning to navigate the world without that simple stupidity to fall back on has been the opposite of easy; the following songs - sometimes in unexpected ways - have helped.
I recently celebrated 5 years of sobriety. In honor of that fact, here is an examination of five songs about drinking that I’ve loved since swearing off the act itself and a look at how they’ve helped me make sense of the new way the world presents itself. And, if you’re looking for something else entirely, there is a variety of playlists linked at the end that are not about drinking, are mostly about living - a thing I’m happy to be getting better at, day by day.
I am not, generally speaking, particularly interested in music videos. As a kid, I had a fondness for VH1’s Pop-Up Videos, but that had more to do with the pop-up factoids than the videos they obscured.
Studies have been done into the ways that music evokes images in a listener’s mind and I’ve always been more drawn to living in the world that the music evokes all on its own. I’ve had limited use for replacing those mental images with other stories that may or may not be all that linked to what’s going on in the text of the song. A good music video is an art, don’t let me be misunderstood, but it is a different art - and not the one that normally keeps me up at night. The art of music videos is one that I tend to keep at arms distance from my relationship with music.
Mostly, I watch music videos when I’m not satisfied with what I see in my head, when I can’t make the music and the story it’s telling me quite line up or I need to find a different road to walk toward understanding. I watch music videos when I’ve listened to a song on loop and I think there’s something else going on and I can’t quite figure out what it is.
What stands out when you just listen to this song, is that there’s a point right around the two minute mark when an unexpected weariness sets in. Or, it did to my ear. And that felt… odd. Not odd to my mind where proximity to people doing shots makes me tired before the first round is set down, nevermind before calls for another are made. To my mind, weariness on one of those nights out is normal, is part of the deal.
Where it isn’t so normal is in a song that had seemed like an anthem for dancing on tables right up until the moment when the strings briefly drop into nothingness and that chorus count comes back in a capella.
Are you allowed to admit in a song about drinking to excess that maybe, just maybe, you’re deeply tired of the whole scene before you’re even halfway through the night?
Oh my. Good lord.
Assuming I was wrong, reading into it too much, I did what I almost never do. I watched the video. And then I watched it again. And again.
Somewhere around the seventh watch, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t fully right about the weariness, but I also wasn’t fully wrong.
To my surprise though - I wasn’t wrong about the weariness being there - I was wrong about where it comes in. When listening, I didn’t clock it fully until two minutes in. Sure, the list of work-a-day troubles is right there in the lyrics from the first line but this is country music which has a legacy of storytelling that means to complain about your work day is normal, expected, just context for the party that is about to be unleashed. The day you’re drinking to forget is a normal part of setting the scene. The drinking being the thing you’re tired of is not.
When you watch the video though - the weariness is there from the first second. It’s there as he stares at the ground before the music even starts. Hand on chin. Staring at the dirt while people start reveling in the background. This again.
During the first two minutes we are going through the motions. This night out at the bar - which isn’t a night out at the bar at all but a sunlit parking lot - isn’t something we’re getting sick of after we’ve been there for a while, it’s something we’re sick of already. Something we’ve maybe always been sick of. We are present and we are making the gestures of a good time but not with any real enthusiasm.
The motions we are going through are, by this point in our life, rote.
At no point in the first two minutes of the song is Shaboozey having as good a time as the blurry group in the background. The message is not just that we are tired halfway through the night, but that we are tired before the night even begins.
That moment when the strings drop out - that’s not the tiredness setting in, it’s the moment of reckoning, the moment where it becomes clear that we’ve got to do this a little bit longer but we don’t have to do it forever. Because right after that, when the music comes back in - that’s when he smiles. That’s when the dance movements get bigger, less controlled. We’re in the homestretch now, soon the night/day will end and we’ll get to go home and get a little bit of a break before we are expected to show up, a little bit of a break before we gon’ do this shit again.
And yes, this is a music video for a song about partying so, yes, of course, it should build to the party, but to me - the smile looked the biggest in the moment right before he exited the frame - right before he got to step away from just how rote the drinking has become.
(And yes, I did briefly peruse the YouTube comment section and yes, it seems everyone else in the world sees this as a video about how fun drinking is and yes, I expected that. Misery is in the eye of the beholder.)
Other than the Shaboozey video, I have watched exactly one other music video in full over the last year and, you guessed it - it’s this one.
The night before the fourth anniversary of my sobriety I watched the official video for this song on loop for hours. I will own that this was a destructive impulse, but one that came from needing to look in the mirror at who I had been and who I was becoming.
The thing about looking in the mirror, though, is that sometimes it is very hard - and it can be especially difficult when the distance between who you have been and who you see reflected now is (mercifully) growing more each day. Sometimes it is much easier to watch a music video for hours instead of looking yourself in the eye for one single second.
And sometimes the music is the truer mirror anyway.
I have not watched the video since and I will not watch it now, but what I remember seeing in the face it reflected back at me was one growing wiser with the knowledge that the past wasn’t always all bad - nothing ever really is. That there were, of course, moments of goodness mixed in with the devastation - that there were tender shimmering smiles and beautiful dancing moments - and that it is okay to sometimes think of them fondly. Nostalgia can be for a moment without being for the fuel.
The line that stood out to me through all of the repeat viewings is a two-sided coin:
Heads: “There’s nothing like living in a bottle, and..”
Tails: “Nothing like ending it all for the world.”
And in this coin toss, in this gamble, the “all” that we are ending is the mindless drinking and the small existence inside those glass bottle walls and the thing we are surrendering it for is - could we be so lucky? - the whole damn world.
I am a believer that most of interpreting lyrics is 99.8% projecting ones own life onto the words of someone else’s experience (and that this indeed is the beauty) so I know that when I watched this video for hours and it made weep it’s not because I’d unlocked some deep and complete understanding of what’s going on in the music or at the center the song.
No, I wept because I was thinking about how (again, mercifully) my coin comes up tails every single day now and despite just how dull I once feared my life would become the person that the video mirror reflected back at me was one that was starting to learn that while my days of swimming with sharks may be over (forever, mercifully) the dancing never has to be.
My relationship to this particular song is the most complicated of the ones on this list. It’s the only song here that I have experienced both drunk and sober, in sickness and in health. It therefore has the dubious honor of being the song most haunted by the person I once was, ‘til death do we part.
There was a time when this was my go-to song for running errands while hungover. We will not be unpacking the reality that I ever had a go-to song for running errands while hungover except to say that the fact that I could sing along to this song while in that diminished state means that I will likely be able to sing along to this song in my grave. I expect if I can keep that coin toss coming up tails and am able to make this sobriety thing stick, my corpse may have a better singing voice than I possessed in my drinking days.
The line that I am still obligated to sing loudest is this one: “With the cards that I’ve been dealt, I can’t win to save my life. I’m lousy in a fist fight even if I have a knife.”
The prevailing implication of this song is that for some of us, the unlucky chosen, our failures are preordained. That our destructive tendencies aren’t a higher power’s oversight. That actually if you squint your eyes and look through amber liquid, slipping up is actually just a way of successfully stumbling toward destiny fulfilled.
When I was grocery shopping for garbage food with a splitting headache and fuzzy vision, it was not difficult to find a certain comfort in this notion. I was meant to be walking up and down the aisles in a fog.
A certain comfort, but a hollow one.
Because while it may feel good to sing that there “ain’t a thing that I can change to get my luck up” the first time, the more times you repeat it the less and less true it starts to feel. It is a rousing chorus until it isn’t. The idea that “God never makes mistakes, he just makes fuck-ups” feels like a clever cop out until you realize, no matter what you believe about how we all got here and where we’ll all headed, there are a lot of other songs to sing that don’t end with writing yourself off before you’ve even begun.
This song was released a couple of days before I took my last drink and became my crutch in those first sober weeks. I had had a lot of false starts and this song doesn’t blink in the face of the idea that being sober is difficult, and that sometimes the reality of it can feel impossible.
This song gave me something to sing along to while I drove around in circles at night trying to make sense of the journey I was setting out on. I would not have my own words to explain the way it felt for a long time to come, but being able to hear my voice sing the words of this song made it feel likely that I would some day. Being able to hear my voice sing the words of this song made it feel like difficult and impossible did not have to be the same thing.
At the time that I stopped drinking, I had not yet fully faced the reality that I was my drunkest friend and that I had been for a long time. I had not yet fully faced it, but I’d been crawling my way toward that understanding.
Singing the lie that lived in the lines “all my friends are drunk, haven’t been wasted in months” repeatedly helped me to look forward to the time when it might not be a falsehood, made me believe that I’d see that day.
Singing the blossoming truth in the lines that “I miss home but also learnt how to create homes in the places that I go to” made me believe that I’d survive that day and be glad for it.
“Blissful but not numb.”
Something that is at once a terrifying reality and a strange mercy is the fact that there is a lot about the drinking years that I have no memory of. This means that my brain is pitted with caverns where memories, good and bad, could have been. It means I have a ticket stub in my wallet for a concert that I have no memory of attending and would insist on not having seen except for the fact that I carry around the proof that says otherwise. It also means that I don’t have quite as much fuel to throw on the bonfire of regret about some of the shittiest things I’ve said and done as I otherwise would.
I have forgotten a lot, but I remember a lot of bathrooms.
And the thing is that the more times you tell a story the more you risk it becoming an unshakeable part of your own personal mythology and when most of the demons you’ve donned your armor to slay are the ones that live in the darkest recesses of your mind the whole concept of a personal mythology gets a little bit tiresome so, no, I won’t be telling you about any of those bathrooms except to say that you and I both know what Florence Welch was doing when she invoked Elvis and bathrooms in this song and that we are all of us lucky for the ones we get to stand up and walk out of.
There is a familiar wooziness to the album version of this song that can make it difficult for me to get through, but I have not one single time succeeded in listening to the live performance with Ethel Cain without listening to it at least three times in a row.
While Welch doesn’t sing wholly alone in the album version, the voices that come in to support when she gets to the chorus serve as a choir of angels more than anything else, and angels in the bathroom with Elvis have a certain implication that can be tough to stomach.
Ethel Cain has a heavenly voice but is no choir of angels. In their duet, Welch and Cain trade lines back and forth in a way that implies a shared understanding. When Cain’s voice comes in she is not singing from a chariot on high; her voice is another earthbound hand reaching out. The duet is a pact - an acknowledgement that we can’t take each other away from all of this, but we might just get through it together.
When I wrote about this song a few years ago, I was preoccupied with the way Welch sang of showing us what it means to be saved until the end when she swapped out the word “saved” for “spared”. When I thought about it then, I was hung up on the idea that there is a vast difference between survival and salvation and that some of us only get to aspire to one of the two.
When I listen to it now I am struck by the way that the passage of time has the power to change the stakes. How I am lucky enough to have made it through enough good days to now believe that survival and salvation might just be the same thing if you let them.
Afterword:
While I have fixated on 5 songs about drinking above, a thing I try not to take for granted about my sobriety is that it’s opened me up a lot more to the abundance that existing more fully in the world can bring. In celebration of that abundance, here are twice as many playlists as there are songs offered above:
Starlight in Our Eyes, However.. - I am deeply into this year’s Sturgill Simpson aka Johnny Blue Skies album, and this springs out of my favorite song from that album.
Caught Beneath the Landslide // But I Know I’ll See Your Face Again - Yes, yes, yes, very excited to see if that Oasis reunion really pans out but mostly glad that their resurgence reminded me just how much I love The Verve and how much it warms my heart that the Brothers Gallagher do, too.
When I know the stars are gonna fall any minute - Another band I love is Fust. I wish everyone was talking about Fust.
just having jazz for dinner - This one’s a few years old, and yes, the concept is just jazz songs that mention food in the title and most of them are about various desserts but I am who I am.
Gee Whiz, Look at These Songs - Carla Thomas! Otis Redding! The Ronnettes! Are you looking at these songs yet?
Fire of Love - Fire of Love is a very good documentary from a couple years ago about a couple (as in two, and also as in in love) of French volcanologists that preoccupied me in strange ways for a long time after I first watched it. Some of the songs on here are from the documentary’s soundtrack, the rest are about being in love or being in volcanoes or both.
snoozegaze ii - Probably should spend more time sleeping instead of making sequels to playlists, and in theory this collection of shoegaze-ish songs is supposed to help with that.
never hear the bad news (listen to the walkmen instead) - Seeing The Walkmen perform again was a highlight of my year, and not just because it reminded me that the cat I had growing up really liked when I played their music, but not not for that reason either.
GroupGoosebumps - A while back I read something that implied that roughly half the world has never experienced getting goosebumps from a song and I asked a bunch of people to send me some of the songs that make them shiver. Here’s 5 and a half hours of things that might do the trick.
November 2024 - I have been making a playlist of songs that are important to me each month, every month, for over eight years. This month’s is shaping up nicely and weirdly and I look forward to revisiting it a few years from now and trying to remember what was going on to make me choose this collection of songs.
As always, now and forever - listen to Ted Hawkins.