#365songs (93 / 365)

Despite that music is a pretty personal thing, I'm aware most of my #365songs writeups have focused on the music qua music rather than what it's meant to me personally: some of this is because I'm genuinely interested in music for its own sake and so I'm often drawn to music for how it's constructed, but some of it's just a tendency to hold my cards close to my chest in public.

In August 2024 one of my cats suddenly started exhibiting distressing litterbox behavior. Urinary tract issues have been common among every male cat I've ever had, and they can be deadly in a shockingly short period of time; one incident with a previous cat, back when we still had a car, resulted in an overnight ER stay and surgery.

We brought him to the feline ER, on foot in the August heat, with him crying in distress directly into my ear from a pet backpack for the entire half-hour walk. Ultimately we caught it in time and he didn't need surgery, but we had to change his diet and closely monitor him for an indeterminate amount of time afterwards. Constantly being on high alert took a toll on my mental health and I got intensely anxious, and my partner gently pushed me to consider looking for some countermeasures.

One of those countermeasures was listening to Shearwater's cover of "This Year" and shaking my limbs until I was able to cry out some of the accumulated tension and stress of the time. It's an interesting cover, coming between the two most immediate and glossily-produced albums of Shearwater's career to date, Animal Joy and Jet Plane and Oxbow, and it definitely sounds like them. Everything about it is more polished and less scrappy than the iconic Mountain Goats original, but that original was so burned into my brain in 2024 that this new version still helped me really feel that chorus again when I most needed it.