Crowded Five To An Apartment

Jeffrey & Jack Lewis “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror” – If you’ve ever been on the L train, or walked around Williamsburg and its vicinity, you can see a lot of people who clearly have some variation of this song’s lyrics running through their mind. It starts out as self-deprecation and a mixture of pride and revulsion for the lifestyle that they’ve attained. The next step is getting sucked into an undertow of fear and doubt about the inherent lack of pragmatism in pursuing the arts as a career, and then the art itself is torn apart after the ego has been fully eviscerated. Then, at the lowest low in this moment between subway stops, there’s a crazy nightmare scenerio played out in the imagination. In the case of this song, it involves Will Oldham mercilessly attacking the singer of this song on an abandoned subway platform. There’s a moment of realization at the conclusion, and that’s about the time when the person gets off the train, goes about their day, and maybe cycles through another permutation of this set of thoughts five more times before getting to bed at night with their cute boyfriend or girlfriend, who is covered in bad tattoos, has a questionable haircut, and has also thought the same thing through a half dozen times over in the previous 24 hours. (Click here for the Jeffrey Lewis site.)