This Year
Album: The Sunset Tree and Come, Come to the Sunset Tree
Lyrics
I broke free on a Saturday morning
I put the pedal to the floor
Headed north on Mills Avenue
And listened to the engine roar[1]
My broken house behind me and good things ahead
A girl named Cathy wants a little of my time
Six cylinders underneath the hood crashing and kicking
Aha, listen to the engine whine
I am going to make it through this year
If it kills me
I am going to make it through this year
If it kills me
I played video games[2] in a drunken[11] haze
I was seventeen years young
Hurt my knuckles punching the machines
The taste of scotch rich on my tongue
And then Cathy showed up and we hung out
Trading swigs from a bottle all bitter and clean
Locking eyes, holding hands
Twin high maintenance machines
I am going to make it through this year
If it kills me
I am going to make it through this year[10]
If it kills me
I drove home in the California dusk
I could feel[3] the alcohol[4] inside of me hum
Pictured the look on my stepfather's face[5]
Ready[6] for the bad things to come
I down shifted as I pulled[7] into the driveway
The motor screaming out[8] stuck in second gear
The scene ends badly as you might imagine
In a cavalcade of anger and fear
There will be feasting and dancing
In Jerusalem next year
I am going to make it through this year
If it kills me
I am going to make it through this year
If it kills me[9]
Banter
- I want to preface (this song) by saying that, if I've gotten any good at writing, it's only through the promethean patience of my professor, Mr. Robert Mezzi, who happens to be here watching me do my thing for the first time ever, so that's- I get nervous about that. And when I wrote this song, there's a word in it that I know is misplaced and needs to be fixed. And I can feel his wonderful glance over my shoulder saying, 'The word isn't cavalcade- whatever the word is, that isn't it.' And so- so I stood around looking for one of these words, but-but I still have three more weeks before I have to go into the studio and record the song. So- avalanche is in the running but I don't think that's it either. I'll keep you updated on it. (2004-10-11)
- It's so awesome to be here because, you know, the record came out on October 6, and that night we did the Colbert Report, and one thing you didn't get to see is that they do the one song that you do on tv, and then you do one just for the audience. Which is right exactly my style, because my main chief problem with the modern world is that everything is broadcast and recorded. I like the idea of some things never seeing light. That's what I'm into. We sang this song for a small audience with Stephen, and it's exciting to be looping around like that. This is called This Year, and you can sing it if you want. (2009-12-01 Webster Hall)
- This is a song about how sometimes you are living in a house and you're in high school and your stepfather is abusing your mother and you, and it really sucks. You have to take a lot of drugs to deal with that, right, but you don't have to, I should say. But you probably do. And when you do, they make you feel marginally better but the main thing that makes you feel better is the company of other people who are as damaged as you are or will shortly become as damaged as you are, and you can sense it, because there is an internal sensor if you bear some damage, you have this sensor that says 'That person is either damaged or is getting there, and I think I will hang out with her until things get a little brighter.' I play this for a lovely person who wore a cape to school. (2011-03-30)
- Drummer's choice! [off mic debate, crowd yelling for songs] The drummer has spoken! The drummer is not one of those guys who wants to play, like, an obscure B-side from '94 as the final encore! That's not what it's like in his gut! He thinks of the person who said, well, there was a particular song I came to hear, and instead he played the monkey song. Maybe that person, he would like, everybody else would be like, monkey song, monkey song, but that one person is like, I don't know or care about a monkey song. They wanna hear the song about how you're gonna make it to the end of the year. (2015-04-02 - Mercy Lounge, Nashville)
JD: [crowd whistles/cheers] If you join a jam band, they do that to you for smoking weed. They do!
Peter: We gotta start a jam band.
JD: Yeah, because people are lined up to hear me solo. Well. I mean, I don't like to presume upon the goodwill of an audience, but I have a feeling people in the room know this song. (2015-04-11 - City Winery, New York City)
- I don't keep notes on recording sessions, but I'm pretty sure John Vanderslice was the guy wiht the idea behind the hand claps on this next tune. Please, welcome back to the stage, from Tiny Telephone San Francisco, John Vanderslice. [JV returns to raucous applause] If you feel like rocking the Rhodes, JV, it's A, to C#m, to D. Other bands would play and practice this, but as I observed earlier, those bands are posers, and we are not. (2017-06-01 The Fillmore)
- You have these little moments that you don’t know are saving your life because they feel tawdry and squalid at the time. I had a corduroy coat that belonged to my father that he had given to me because he had moved on to a new corduroy coat and I noticed that it had a rip in the lining so I could put a fifth of Cutty Sark in there and go to school. Cutty Sark is terrible stuff and hard to stomach when you’re seventeen but I figured it out. (Do I have to change guitars, Avel? Okay.) Then I can tell the long version of this story. So, Cutty Sark. It’s a scotch whiskey, and it’s not very, how do I say this, it’s not very good. But I had some. And I had it in the lining of this old corduroy coat that belonged to my father which seemed kind of important to me. He was sober, he’d been on the program for a decade at that point but I myself was not, because I was having a pretty bad year of it when I was seventeen and I was getting worse and worse as a person. I was not getting, it was bad, it was real bad, but you have these moments, I was saying, where people are sort of saving your life and I spent a Saturday afternoon hanging out in a parking garage that was under construction at a place at Harvey Mudd called the Mudd Hole that had the Gorgar pinball machine. That machine knows who its boss is. They had Crystal Castles featuring Bentley Bear. They had Quiz & Dragons later on, but at this time they mainly had a hallway where me and a friend could sit and pass a bottle of scotch back and forth while I waited to go back home to get my ass beat. This is called This Year. (2019-09-12)
- I'd like to welcome to the stage the guy who recorded this song, John Vanderslice. [raucous cheering and various instrument noises] I believe that the hand claps were actually his idea. We did them in real time instead of doing four of them and copying and pasting because we're not posers. (2023-10-03 The Belasco)
Live Performances
Footnotes
1. "I listened to the engine" (2013-07-26), "I could listen to it" (2019-05-07)
10. "cursèd year" (2007-09-22 - [ed. we had no fucking idea did we])
4. "ativan" (2017-06-01)
5. "red, red face" (2017-06-01)
2. "Mr. Dew" (?) instead of "video games" (2023-10-02) "aero fighters" (2019-05-07)
3. "hear" instead of "feel" (2013-07-26, 2015-04-09, 2019-05-07, 2023-10-02, 2023-10-06, 2023-10-27, 2023-10-28)
6. "ready, getting ready" (2019-05-07)
7. "turned" (2015-04-09, 2021-08-06, 2021-08-08, 2023-10-06, 2023-10-27, 2023-10-28)
8. "it was" before "stuck in second gear" (2013-07-26, 2015-04-09, 2019-05-07, 2021-08-08, 2023-10-05, 2023-10-27, 2023-10-28)
9. Line repeated, sometimes multiple times (2019-05-07, 2021-08-06, 2021-08-08, 2023-10-28)
11. "Cutty Sark haze" (2013-07-26)