366 Songs 020: Before My Heart Attacks


“Before My Heart Attacks” has a very particular meaning for me, as a song; I remember vividly listening to this song over and over during one Christmas break when I was in art school, back home with my parents and missing my girlfriend even though everything was up in the air about us (We broke up pretty soon after I went back to school, and I remember her telling me that she’d been thinking about how we weren’t working out during this same break, something that I find both funny and sad; the mental image of me sitting at home, pining, while she’s literally on the other side of the country thinking, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I can do better”), and the melancholy and bewilderness of this song seemed to fit my mood even before the last line about “waitin’ on your letter” swung in, with the strings dipping to underscore the end of the song.

It’s a pretty song, saved from potential tweeness (With lyrics like “Garbage man, oh garbage man/Why won’t you leave the street/How can this street/possibly excrete/this much trash seven days a week?” you can possibly see my concerns about tweeness) almost entirely by the arrangement, with the glorious swooping strings backing the plucked guitar and making the whole thing feel at once intimate and epic, the way that relationships do when you’re in the middle of them and things seem to be going wrong. It’s a song that makes you think that the writer, Jason Falkner (ex of Jellyfish, although that may mean little to you; it’s the entire reason I bought the album this was from – Presents Author Unknown – without listening to it, though), is almost there, and has greatness just waiting for him, but if that’s the case, he pretty much kept that greatness under wraps; “Before My Heart Attacks” and another song from the same album, “I Go Astray,” were pretty much as good as he ever got, if you ask me.