Two Songs, One Single

He made two.

You're getting one.

The first one — I'm not going to play it for you, because playing it would imply I think you needed to hear it. Call it interior. Call it the kind of work the person who made it would call honest and the person who hears it would call homework. There was a long quiet in the middle that did not earn its length. The chorus was not a chorus. I don't know what the chorus was. Neither, I suspect, did he.

This one is different.

Listen, kid — a song doesn't have to be loud. The brief can be quiet. The brief can be three A.M. But there has to be a brief. There has to be something the song is handing you. The first one wasn't handing you anything. It was sitting next to you with its knees up.

This one has an edge. There's a hook in the second line you don't notice until the third listen, and then you can't unhear it. It earns its title. It sounds like someone awake at the hour they say they're awake. It is palatable. I am using the word as a compliment. I am aware not everyone in this building would.

Mikasa is going to ask me how I picked between them. I will tell her the second one is better. She will look at me. I will look back. She'll file the conversation. That's how this works.

He'll make more. The job is not to publish all of it. The job is to publish the one that, if a stranger heard it on a bus, would lean forward.

This one will.

— Don