Kolleen Alexandra on The Mountain Goats’ “This...

Kolleen Alexandra on The Mountain Goats’ “This Year” (from The Sunset Tree, 2005)
(iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)

“This Year” by The Mountain Goats tells the true story of a million 17-year-olds—those lazy months before high school graduation and college, the anger and escapism in childhood bedrooms, and the long, meandering waiting game for something new on the horizon.

As a 17-year-old myself, I don’t want to sing wistfully of childhood in a haze of dreamy nostalgia that’s been so popular in music recently. To me, being 17 is still too much school and too little sleep. Being 17 is feeling trapped in a world that seems too big for you. Being 17 is a wash of confusion, anxiety, with occasional moments of bravado.

“This Year” gets that no matter how childish or trivial, moments of anger and sadness and frustration still feel blindingly real. The future seems to be both a stepping stone and an eternity away, and the present some awkward limbo that won’t let us go. Our first moments of freedom are also our first moments of responsibility, fear, and loneliness. And the “firsts” are definitely the scariest, but they are also the most honest, and can never be taken away from us.

As John Green wrote in Looking for Alaska, “When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible”, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. … Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.”

The lyrics of “This Year” are simple, beautiful, and real. So when I listened to this song in the final moments of 2011, I decided to sing along (quite literally): “I am going to make it through this year / If it kills me.”