THE SET LIST: HAPPINESS BY THE KILOWATT

Day 11. A Song From Your Favorite Band
Happiness By The Kilowatt, City And Colour

I know now that the title was taken from, and the song apparently based on, a Kurt Vonnegut speculative fiction short story, The Euphio Question, which tackled the cheeriest of subjects: the underside of absolute happiness. But I've always heard this as a song about marital disillusion. I suspect I've always been predisposed to the inevitability of growing old with a life partner wrapped around my finger, in a manner of speaking, and despite no luck on that front so far, I probably, perhaps foolishly, still am. Call it social conditioning, call it religious fascism, and who knows if it is, but I have no grudge against it. Just seemed to have missed the window is all. I do confess to having this faint but niggling phobia of what Dallas is singing about: " . . .so this is continuous happiness, you know I always imagined it something more . . . " The brutal letdown of pinning your hopes on something and having that something be everything you expected it to be except it turns out everything you expected it to be wasn't enough, and how intolerable the regret that comes from it must be.

Dallas Green, who is sad bastard incarnate and has a voice that tends to melt me in my weakest moments, usually half past midnight with the headphones strapped to my ears, is covering himself here, slowing down a raucous number by his other and frankly bland punk band, Alexisonfire, until it bleeds out discontent and anticlimax, albeit prettily. I tend to lack sophistication in the things that bring me to grief, my index of woes boiling down, at some point, to a sadness of loss. Loss of love, loss of faith, loss of spark, loss of time, loss of awe, loss of anyone you love, what-have-you. I'm pretty sure this qualifies as a song of loss, and even if it doesn't, it does give me the same twinge as if it was. There may be some comfort in being alone together, a grudging comfort but a comfort nonetheless, but one that doesn't go far in tempering the inevitable and unbearable gravity of the song's last words: " . . .was this what we hoped for?" God forbid.