I NEED CLOSURE

This song is not what you think

Every band has these songs. Album tracks they love that were never singles. Good songs that just kinda disappear into the ether. No one mentions them in reviews, no one begs you to play them live.

Maybe they get overlooked because they’re buried in a weird spot on the tracklist. Or maybe, even though they’ve got all the elements - the hooks, the vibe, the lyrics - they’re missing the juice, that intangible stuff no one really understands, the stuff that just makes a song really fucking hit.

Closure is one of those songs. People like it. I’m not gonna do my usual self-deprecating song and dance (good pun) and say it’s shit. It’s not. I think it’s a good song that just never found its home.

For a long time even the four of us kinda forgot that Closure existed. It wasn’t one of the songs in the live rotation, and it just kinda… Got lost. I don’t know.

We started playing it again on our last tour. We ended up playing it almost every night. It felt good. And I’ve been thinking, sometimes you put out a song and for whatever reason it just doesn’t go. Fair enough. But maybe some context would help, because the story behind the song is good, and I don’t think it’s one I’ve ever told.

When we were touring The Dream Is Over, we had a day off and went to the Wolf Sanctuary of Pennsylvania, where we had a guided tour. There was this one wolf at the sanctuary, this old ripper named Thor, who had howled his vocal cords into oblivion and couldn’t make a sound anymore.

Lets get this out of the way before we go any further - yes, that was exceptionally relatable to me in that moment, having just shredded my own vocal cords. But that’s not what got me about Thor, it was something way more upsetting and primal.

His story goes like this:

Thor was rescued along with a bunch of other wolf pups, but started developing cataracts early on. He became vulnerable so he had to be separated from the rest of the pack. He was kept in his own enclosure, and on the other side of the fence was a lady wolf named Lucky and they would sleep side by side against the fence together.

Eventually the staff decided to put them into the same enclosure, and Lucky protected Thor as his eyesight worsened.

Here’s the thing - wolves mate for life. And for years the two were inseparable.

One day Lucky laid down and didn’t wake up again. Thor, in his grief, wouldn’t leave her body, wouldn’t let the caretakers near it, wouldn’t let them bury her. So one day while Thor slept, the caretakers, doing what they felt was right, snuck in and removed Lucky’s body.

When Thor woke up and discovered her missing, he started howling. Wouldn’t stop. Couldn’t understand what had happened. He was blind and full of grief and confusion and heartbreak.

For months he would wake from his sleeping spot - the exact spot where Lucky had laid down for the final time - and would start howling until he couldn’t howl any more.

One day, his vocal cords just gave out. I guess he’d howled enough for one lifetime. He never made a sound again.

All of it felt so real to me, so human. So much like any of us in our grief and heartbreak. I don’t often think of animals experiencing such a prolonged intensity of emotion. Maybe protected animals have a greater ability to experience emotion because they aren’t as preoccupied with survival? I don’t know. But I recognized in the story something that all of us have felt firsthand - this feeling of not being able to let go, even when you know that holding on is only making it worse.

Woof. Heavy. My bad.

Go listen to the song. Now that you know what it’s about maybe it’ll connect with you a little more, hit a little harder. Or maybe you listen and it does nothing and you move on and that’s ok too. The fact is, some songs hit and some don’t, and I rarely know why. Maybe context doesn’t matter for shit, a song either gives you the feeling or it doesn’t. I don’t know. You tell me.

Either way I’m glad you read this and I’m glad I wrote it and now we can all move on to something lighter. Just don’t look at the news.

THANKS FOR READING! BYE!