Keep Your Eyes Ahead

This album is a couple of years old, and Cursive fans sort of denounced it, but it resonated with me for whatever reason and I was listening to it earlier today. I think it has to do with the fact that besides writing for bunch of different places around town here (i.e. my dream job, basically--though for now it qualifies as just a hobby mostly), my day job/career (i.e. what I do to pay the bills) revolves around construction and that is a central theme on Happy Hollow: your work and your life are not the same thing. Just in case you don't know, this is a concept album (sort of) about a fictional Midwestern town called Happy Hollow and some of it's residents, one of whom is the now-adult Dorothy Gale (from The Wizard Of Oz.) We find her with her dreams broken and evaporated. She is working for a living, trapped in an unhappy marriage.

There are other things at play here, a secretly gay clergyman, a young woman having an affair--conceiving a child as a result--while her soldier husband is at war, along with several others and much of it reads as an indictment of small towns and the secrets and closemindedness that often go with living in one. I grew up in the city and still live there, but I know many people from small towns and they have just as many scandalous stories from their towns as I do. They are no better or worse than I am.

There is a work ethic native to the Midwest that gets a lot done but leaves little time for leisure. You work and sweat and work some more, that is all. If you are not sweating, you are not working, you are screwing around. This seems silly to a lot of people but it's the truth. There is little or no time for dreams or ideas or anything like that. Just do what you are told and go home at the end of the day. This is a central theme to this album, too. Your dreams aren't worthless, they give you something to live for. Nobody lives for work, everyone has to have a job, but your job is not (or at least should not be) your life.

Hypocrisy is present everywhere not just the city, people are fallible and, well, human. People cheat even though it's bad and there are gay people in small towns, too. You get the sense that a lot of these issues had bothered Cursive's lead singer, Tim Kasher, for some time. Things like this bother me, too.

I grew up in a blue-collar family. My dad worked his ass off for us when I was little. He came home dirty and frozen in the winter, dirty and sweat-stained in the summer. We led a good life that had been gleaned from his sweat, but sometimes he forgets there is more than one way to make a living and that following your dreams in an attempt to make a living isn't stupid or childish or a waste of time--it's what keeps many people going. As great as I think my dad is, I often think he let his dreams die somewhere along the line and even he doesn't realize it. He is a generally happy guy, but sometimes I think, "Does he ever wonder 'what if?' about a dream, any dream he once had?"

I think ultimately this is what I love about this album, it's about people with broken dreams and shattered lives, inner conflict and the devastation that can be reaped by simply settling for "good enough" but it doesn't celebrate these things, it plays as a warning: "Don't become these people, and it's as easy not to be as it is to become them."

When I get discouraged I listen to Happy Hollow and promise myself, "I will not become them, keep doing what you are doing and you will do just fine. Dream big and don't settle. 'Good enough' is never good enough."