Crumbler

Ladder Song

Bright Eyes

With summer ending and the fog rolling back into San Francisco, I find myself turning increasingly to Bright Eyes’ glum “Ladder Song.” Its first-take immediacy set it apart from the rest of The People’s Key, a muddled and mostly unsuccessful record that came and went without much fuss in February, but after nine months of listens the song seems to me to sit comfortably among Conor Oberst’s best. It was written as a tribute to a friend who committed suicide, the sort of fraught emotional terrain that Oberst has thrived in for a decade. What surprises you is the oblique angle at which Oberst approaches his subject: his lyrics are elliptical and restrained, suggesting somber meanings without ever quite confirming them.

It’s a welcome shift from Oberst, who first charmed me with the sledgehammer wit he used in recounting romantic exploits. (“Our love is dead but without limit, like the surface of the moon,” goes the start of my favorite over-the-top Bright Eyes track.) But here the subject is too painful for hyperbole; Oberst has to approach from an angle. “No one knows where the ladder goes,” he begins. “You’re gonna lose what you love the most.” He talks about staying up late and reading science fiction, a recurring subject in The People’s Key, and about long days made longer by “a twisting mind.” He longs for an escape — to “the center,” to “the concert,” to some vague celebration — but it never comes.

“Ladder Song” breaks your heart just before its end, when Oberst at last sees his dead friend in the sky above him: “See now a star is born, looks just like a blood orange. Don’t it just make you wanna cry?” As a matter of fact. “Precious friend of mine,” he sings. We mourn with him.

The words “You’re not alone” appear three times in “Ladder Song,” with the line repeated twice in the final lines. “You’re not alone in anything,” Oberst sings — to his friend? To himself? — “You’re not alone in trying to be.” There’s a final puzzle in that line; has Oberst trailed off in mid-sentence? Is making peace with the idea his friend acted out of a sense of necessity? I keep coming back to this song hoping that the pieces will assemble themselves into an answer — much as I imagine Oberst returns to the subject of his friend’s suicide time and again in hopes of making sense of it. The song expresses with grave eloquence its own confusion, the way loved ones left behind by suicide are tortured with questions of what might have been. The path of understanding turns out to be a ladder to nowhere. But we climb anyway.

(track via everything-allthetime)

• 90 plays