Unbest

Caroline Klibanoff on Okkervil River’s “Plan D” (from Golden Opportunities 2, 2011)
(download EP here) 

It’s hard to talk about December without talking about November, and it’s hard to talk about November at all. A miserable month, yes; a persistent “damp, drizzly November in my soul”; an amalgamation of events and moods that left me unwilling and uninterested in taking charge of the situation that had rendered me so gloomy.

Here it is: I graduate in May, I have no plans now, I may not then.

Some people thrive on uncertainty. It frees them from the oppression of expectation, launches them into the realm of newfound possibility. Some people handle it, see it for what it is—so what, you don’t have a job? Don’t have an idea? Join the club, you’re a statistic, you’re twenty-two, you’ll be fine. And some people—ahem—take a nugget of concern and make it the seed of an entire Perma-Mood, a worldview listing dangerously close to hopelessness even as reality shouts from the sidelines: Hey, come back to us!

I was losing ground. It didn’t matter that I was hardly alone in this; it didn’t matter that the source of the issue was probably small potatoes to most people. My mind was heavy with Big Questions and Great Distress about my life, my choices and the pressing immediate future.

And, meanwhile, my ears were full with the stark, snarling folk-rock in Okkervil River’s The Stage Names, taking solace in such disaffected revulsion with the world: “Plus Ones”—shish, nailed it. “You Can’t Hold the Hand of a Rock and Roll Man”—yeah, tell me something I don’t know. “John Allyn Smyth Sails”—well, this is the worst trip I’ve ever been on, indeed. The album is ideal for the darkest of minds, accelerating the blackest of moods. I thought we were in it together, me and Will Sheff.

But then, at the end of November, Okkervil River released an EP of five fairly obscure covers called Golden Opportunities 2. And it’s not dark at all. It’s not happy-go-lucky, to be sure—but it is, as the title implies, golden, made all the sweeter coming off my binge on The Stage Names. My own deliverance came through in the rendition of Bill Fay’s “Plan D.”

“Plan D” brings nothing new to the table in terms of rock ‘n’ roll, and the lyrics, while gripping, have to be attributed to Fay. But the feeling? The absolute letting-go of choice and burden, the raucous celebration of being alive despite the obvious difficulty that merely existing brings? That’s all Okkervil River, and it’s all infectious. “Cant you see you’re in on it? / You were born / though you need not have been born here at all,” Sheff wails with intent. “And is that not some cause for worship / being born beneath these trees?”

It’s the ultimate moment of human clarity, a variation on Woody Allen’s “Why is life worth living?” monologue at the end of Manhattan, or Whitman’s “To die is different from what anyone supposed / and luckier.” “Plan D” was a voice of hope from the same folks I had just been in the doldrums with, the sound of a shadowy mind seeing clear and bright for the first time. 

I didn’t have, and I still don’t have a plan. But I feel lucky to have found “Plan D.”

Caroline Klibanoff Tumbls here and writes mostly here.