Song Diary: 12/2/20
It’s like you’re looking for something you’re not totally sure you’ll get to find
The first time I heard Going By, the second album by Told Slant, I was doing what I’ve wanted to do since I was a pop-punk-addled teenager—I was leaving my hometown. Quiet, quavering, and close even in its moments of electric apex, Going By was a strange choice to kill time as I waited at my gate at the Orlando airport. I had to keep cranking the volume to hear Felix Walworth sing tentatively about loss, nerves, and change over the murmuring crowds gathering around the small Dunkin’ Donuts and Auntie Anne’s.
It wasn’t the best setting to give a detailed listen to this particular album, but it’s what I needed at the time. Something about Going By has always synced up with a certain feeling I’ve encountered a lot over the past four and a half years, a feeling of wanting so badly to push forward into the next thing, of being so ready to emerge as a new iteration of yourself but not being sure who that is, what it looks like, which direction to turn. “I wanna battering ram this life,” Walworth sings in a low voice during the solemn coda of “Delicate.”
I was a recent graduate at the time, still reeling from watching my post-undergrad plans fall apart one-by-one during my final semester. Assumed paths forward had dissolved and disappeared. It was difficult not to feel the lasting sting of failure at a point in my life when I probably should have felt excited at the possibilities. It looked like an untamed woods before me then, a dramatic thing to say but I was certainly scared and felt more than a little lost.
What I was doing on that day in the airport felt a little like using Walworth’s battering ram. Whatever well-planned idea I had of what I was going to do next was no longer viable; now I had to take steps one at a time and hope that things would work out. I sold my car and went where I wanted to go, Philadelphia. Perpetually uncertain, I made things up as I went along and I got lucky a number of times. It was good and I’m glad it worked out the way it did.
When I listen to Point the Flashlight and Walk, the new album from Told Slant and their first since Going By, I think about its assuredness, its fullness. This is an album that feels more fleshed out than Walworth’s previous work—the negative space that Going By’s songs often seemed to be reacting to is colored in with details, sonic and lyrical flourishes. Its cathartic moments feel more like triumphs than laments. It’s cavernous at first glance and constantly deepening as time goes on.
One of my favorite songs on Point the Flashlight and Walk is “Bullfrog Choirs,” which is I guess one of the more energetic tracks on the album. It moves along at a swift clip, and it opens with the lines “you have to want to go past the access roads with your flashlight drawn.” The song goes on to describe a difficulty in forgetting someone, an inability to leave some kind of loss behind—“for the rest of my life will I gnaw at this bone?” But it’s that first line that’s striking to me. It sounds kind of like vague directions you’d give to someone, not the kind of directions to get them to a specific place but the kind of directions to help them find something fleeting—a kind of bird you can only see way out beyond the city limits or the best place to watch the sun rise. Like you’re looking for something you’re not totally sure you’ll get to find.
A lot of Point the Flashlight and Walk makes me think in these kinds of terms. “Family Still” absorbs its absence into a remaining peace—”you’re my family still even though we don’t talk now.” “No Backpack” imagines a new battering ram (“I could pack my life into the Honda, leave you upstairs, and drive by the moon), but although it sounds vibrant, it remains a fantasy. “Flashlight On” joyfully considers putting a little faith in the hands of a force outside yourself, leading to one of the most emotional moments on the record:
Just following light, no direction at all
I’ve spent so much of my life with no passion at all
Just want to get lost, point the flashlight and walk
Point the flashlight and walk
Point the flashlight and walk
Point the flashlight and walk
I think a number of these songs are speaking in the context of relationships, but I tend to look at them in terms of how they talk about getting a little brave and charging forward with a path you can never be 100 percent sure is correct. Taking steps into the dark with whatever knowledge or love or faith or whatever it is that you do have and knowing from experience that whatever distance you can see ahead of you might not be enough. You may be headed for a dead end or a cliff or whatever. But that’s alright, you have time. You can always point the flashlight back in the other direction and figure it out from there.
I am obviously projecting. But the relationship between Going By and Point the Flashlight and Walk has been on my mind a lot as I come to a point where I am trying again to find a path toward a place I thought I was headed when I graduated. I was halfway through trying to write this essay when I read Bineet Kaur’s really good essay on rejection, which is helping me articulate this a little bit. Four years ago, I was less ready for literally anything. Back then, rejection felt sort of devastating. But in reality it was fine and if I go through it again, I know it will still be fine. And if I don’t go through it again, I’m still better off having gone through it the first time. The Told Slant on Going By approached their losses from a quietly dispirited angle, but the one that made Point the Flashlight and Walk carries a kind of peace. They’ve lived through it and they know that there are always other directions they can take if it comes down to it. They just have to pick one and start walking.
the fluxy 