Good Morning, Captain

For reasons that are slightly too complicated to warrant typing, my iTunes music folder is not connected to the usual computer that I get my music from. I mean, I still load my podcasts onto the Shuffle, but I can't refill the music, because there is no music on my regular computer's iTunes. As a result, every day this week as soon as the podcasts run out I hear Slint's Good Morning, Captain. I'm not really much of a Slint fan in general, but I never really tire of this particular song, and since I was just in Louisville (called "Possibility City" by the locals, by the way) I figured I should be respectful and not delete it. The song is like a case study in tension and release, with a little mystery thrown in, and a little emotional manipulation at the end, so there is something for everybody. I also believe (perhaps wrongly) that there are diminished fifths, sixths and augmented sevenths in there, so that's pretty good too.

I don't really know what's happening in the song, but there seems to be a confrontation between the captain of a former ship and a little boy at the shipwreck site. Then suddenly he's saying "I miss you" and you realize you're in one of those Neil Young Cortez the Killer moments and he's at "And I know she's living there..." and maybe we're not singing about shipwrecks at all, are we.