The Benjamin Report

This is the first part of a series I’d like to start where I talk about my favorite songs of all time.

Alright, show of hands: who here has a spare half-a-million? The kind of money you can use to knock it all down and start rebuilding.

Okay okay, no more kidding around. The other day I was with my girlfriend making an ice cream stop and I played this song on our way home. I told her that I think this might be one of my all-time favorite songs, and that I couldn’t really articulate as to why. Just the idea of a young couple trying to find a house to buy and distracting themselves thinking about the homeowners of generations past, and accompanied with a lilting guitar the sound of daydreams. There is something so cozy about that construction, and only sad enough that it remains both unforgettable and endlessly replayable.

I am in awe of Courtney Barnett’s songwriting. She feeds the listener only the barest of details, but so singular that they stick: “I’m saving 23 dollars a week… Then I see the handrail in the shower… I can’t think of floorboards anymore”. And with these sparse descriptors, she pairs a patient guitar and a vocal melody that switches between a rising and descending arpeggio. The result is a balance on the wilting side between optimism and sadness. And it all ends with that echo of “… A spare half-a-million/You could knock it down and start rebuildin’”.

I don’t want to get too lost in the weeds of authorial intent–especially as I don’t know much about Australian politics and history–but I do think some spare facts are relevant here. Courtney Barnett is from Melbourne, the most populous and fastest growing city in Australia, and Preston (the location of the house in the song) is a suburb. The unmentioned instigator of the story is an escape from the city, and the location of choice is a “deceased estate” in Preston where our narrating couple could start their new life. The haunting refrain reminds us that to start a new life here, they have to knock down an old one that belongs to the older generation; our singer can’t think of the house as anything other than the home of a couple that they will never meet and all the stories it keeps within its furnishings.

In this way, “Depreston” is a small and haunting elegy to the inevitability of the future’s destruction of the past: both to the measure of human understanding and the material structure of the world. To become a home again, an old home must go away.

Now I find myself falling away. These interrogations aren’t what draw me into the song. This patchwork of meaning isn’t why I listen to it over and over again. I listen to it because I like it. I like the jangly, comforting guitar melodies. I like the simple rhythms of the drums and bass line. It could be the soundtrack to a lifetime, and it sounds like a life well-spent nonetheless. And maybe that home has gone away with the inevitability of time passing, but the song remembers it. And the music isn’t going away anytime soon, if ever.