Song To Get You Through The Goddamn Day #097:

You Won’t: “Three Car Garage”

A timeline of my experience with “Three Car Garage” would reveal a rather wide range of emotions. I first heard the song a few days ago, enjoyed it and made a note to come back to it in the very near future. This morning, I watched the duo’s video for the song and though I was admittedly skeptical of it’s beginning movement, I was laughing and praising it’s cleverness just a few short moments later. Finally, this evening, after listening to the song as loud as possible at least a dozen times, I realized that this isn’t just a great new song, but it should be one of the most important songs released in 2012.

On the way back to my place after walking my dog earlier this evening, I smelled something that momentarily led me to believe that something in the vicinity of the building had caught fire. For the briefest moment, my mind flashed over what I would need to save from the apartment. Since the human and the animal element were already outside, I instantly saw visions of instruments, laptops and clothes that needed my immediate help. However, just as soon as the visions appeared, they just as quickly disappeared when it became clear that someone nearby was cooking some sort of awful food substance that was responsible for the smell of potentially toasted personal artifacts.

“Three Car Garage” is a send up of all of the ridiculous things that we each so desperately cling to believing are important to us. Ultimately, these “items” are just not that necessary to any of us. We are all guilty of taking the wrong things for granted too much of the time. At just under two minutes into the song, singer Josh Arnoudse slips into a Dylanesque cadence and relates a string of words that I believe to be some of the finer lyrics I’ve heard in quite a while. My apologies if any of these are slightly off:

I’ve been brought up clean and organized.
I’ve been each December satisfied.
I’ve had wishes granted, none denied.
I’ve been flown down south and Disney-fied.
I’ve sailed twenty seas in deep denial on a million frequent flyer miles, 
ran a gauntlet built of grocery aisles in a walking wall of guilt and bile.
Tell me, are you not the same as me?
Did you pay your dues in little league?
Did you wash your hands of blood and greed and stumble back in time of need?
You are clever imitation minds of photographs and DVDs.
You are subtle repetition tied to thirty-two inch plasma screens.
It’s a delusion, babe.

[Skeptic Goodbye drops February 14, 2012 on Old Flame]