My friend Kyle and I have for many years played a game where we text each other something like “BEST SONG ON OK COMPUTER GO” and then the other person has to respond by the end of the day. The way the game works is that we don’t ask the other person to justify, and usually we disagree on the answer, and then we argue and argue and come to no conclusions. The point of the game is kind of to prompt the other person to share their opinion but really it’s to share our own.
I find the exercise enticing because it forces me to make a decision that I don’t want or need to make, but which will communicate something about me and how I think to at least myself and maybe to one other person. In some ways it’s the ultimate exposure, to let someone see what choices I make and how I make them when the stakes are zero. Plus I get to practice committing to something, then possibly feel deeply unsettled by this — what if I committed to the wrong thing — then exorcise this unsettled-ness by yelling at Kyle about how dumb his choice is and how stupid he is, and then laugh and laugh.
Another thing Kyle and I do is make lists of the top ten or fifteen songs by our favorite bands, which we redo every year or every couple of years and then compare them to each other’s and to the lists we made in the past. I usually scribble mine down on whatever piece of paper and with whatever writing utensil are nearest; a year or two ago I put together a list of my favorite The National songs with a blue colored pencil on a coffee-stained notebook page. (See photo.) I think Kyle is much better than I am at saving the past lists; I really live for the moment of making and then sharing them and subsequently tend to forget where I put them, though in recent years I’m making more of an effort to keep track of them.
I spent this past weekend with Kyle at his new house in Nashville. When he picked me up from the airport, “Forever after Days” from The National’s The Virginia EP was playing in the car. I asked “what are we listening to?” but, of course, I already knew. Someone once asked me a question I was sure he already knew the answer to, and when I asked him why he’d asked at all, he told me that he felt good, satisfied, contented, when the answer matched his expectation, when what he knew was coming indeed came. I had never thought about that before, and it rang so true that now, sometimes, I ask questions whose answers I already know.
I got Kyle into The National forever ago, after someone else, whose opinions he distrusted, nearly turned him off forever. We’ve seen them live together twice; we text each other the same lyrics from the same songs with regularity and react to them as though seeing them for the first time. A few weeks ago — I don’t remember what prompted it — we decided to make a The National bracket. When I told him I was coming to visit, we decided we’d do it in person in a “lock yourselves in a room and don’t come out until it’s ready” type of situation. It was going to rain all weekend. It was a perfect plan. (In reality, we did most of it while standing in line for egg-casserole biscuits.) I always imagined it would be a lot of work to put one of these together (it was) and that there’s no way it could be scientific (it wasn’t).
But it was immensely rewarding: making a power ranking, arguing with Kyle about whether the really good part of “Friend of Mine” could make it beat out “Looking for Astronauts,” making four different regions based on the top four seeds and determining which songs fit properly in each, realizing how well I know this band’s discography, how frustratingly cyclothymic I can be in my opinions, how remarkably consistent.
That’s what so much of being a fan is, in the end — not the fact, but the feeling.
In the spirit of fandom, here is ALL THE VERY BEST OF THE NATIONAL, a 64-song The National bracket. Fill it out (read the READ ME tab first), share it with friends, get mad at me, get mad at Kyle. There’s a complaints box; you are cordially invited to do your worst. If you don’t know The National, you can take this as an invitation to get to know them. If you don’t like them, you can delete this, forget it, throw it away. If you become an overnight fan, let me know.
I’m looking forward to seeing everyone’s brackets, to being appalled and delighted at your tastes, to know that I am right, and so are you, and you are wrong, and so am I.