#130, “Peace to You Too, Motherfucker,” Des Ark (2015)

150 Favorite Songs: #130, “Peace to You Too, Motherfucker,” Des Ark (2015)

I have hungry ears. I seek out new music constantly. There are so many songs that are meaningful to me from different stages in my life, and so many songs that I revisit over and over again and probably always will—this entire project is about those songs, after all—but music is so important to me and the way that I understand my own feelings that I need to find it in new places, and frequently. There’s a thing that happens when I hear a new song that makes me feel something in my chest that I didn’t know was there, but which becomes a recognizable part of me once I find it, and for which I am thereafter forever grateful.

I can remember the first time I heard “Peace to You Too, Motherfucker” really well, as a result. I’d never heard of Des Ark, which is—as I understand it, anyway—mostly just one person named Aimée Argotte who wrote really beautiful songs over the course of several years until, I think, mostly leaving music to do other things that allow a person who is not famous, which Des Ark never became, to earn a living. For years, when I was primarily a music journalist, I would get advance streams and press releases of new music and most of it would not connect with me. But because I am constantly looking for something to make my heart swell or to make me feel sad or powerful or to inspire me to create something of my own, I never stopped clicking. And one of them was a copy of Everything Dies by Des Ark, which I pressed play on, and within moments—those exended first moments, where the bass is slow and the guitar sounds not just like notes and chords but fingers sliding over taut strings made of steel and nylon, a sound that’s tangible, and the strings or synths or whatever it is comes in to make a sound that feels like warmth—I knew that this was going to be a record that meant something to me.

And then, after a minute, the singing begins. There’s the primary vocal, where Argotte sings a pair of four-line verses in an etheral voice about these vivid images—fantasizing about the relationships one can have with other people and with your own pain and hurt, and how those things intersect—and then there’s the backing vocal, which spends those first verses as a low moan, repeated over and over, until everything slows down and then brightens into a chorus that doesn’t have any words at all, and which somehow confirms that those sad, painful lines that preceded it is true and real and authentic. Then, finally, there’s a third verse, just four more lines that connect it all into something profoundly sad, before the chorus bleeds into something beautiful, fading away into feedback as the song ends.

I remember that because according to iTunes, I’ve listened to “Peace to You Too, Motherfucker,” and most of the other songs on Everything Dies, one hundred and forty-eight times in the past eight years, and that doesn’t count however many times I’ve played the record I bought after I saw Des Ark play a few months after that day, but we’ll call it two hundred? I remember it even though it was just a morning I spent at my laptop clicking around on my email, until it wasn’t, until it was a morning when I felt something new because of a patient bassline and a chorus that only comes in after a half-second of quiet and lyrics that express something real. What a gift it is to have a morning at home where nothing happened become an important part of your life because someone went into a studio and put their own feelings onto a record.