Make You Feel Everything You've Never Even Seen

Meditating on my favorite song of the year and why I feel the way I do about it

Catholicism is strange.

And it wasn’t until I had made some friends outside of Catholic school, gone to some weddings and funerals that weren’t in Catholic churches, and became more exposed to other ways of doing the religion thing that I realized just how specifically weird Catholicism was.

I of course knew it was weird to some extent. I didn’t particularly like Catholic school, and my parents weren’t super strict or to-the-letter about it. Hence how I ended up with a copy of Kevin Smith’s 1999 movie Dogma.

Dogma is the story of two fallen angels, played by Catholic superstars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, who are condemned by God to spend eternity in a place worse than Hell – Wisconsin – for a failed coup. They learn about a loophole that, if executed correctly, would make it so that God is capable of making a mistake and thus undo everything. Everything.

Hilarity, hijinks and most importantly to a middle-school Brendan, blasphemy, ensue. Worth a watch (I think, it’s been a while — I’m positive some bits likely don’t hold up so I can’t give a 100% sweeping endorsement of it), especially if you’ve ever been to Catholic church, whether by choice or force (or both).

It blew my mind a little at the time.

You could make fun of this stuff? Other people thought some of this was bullshit? During my day job as a kid in Catholic school, this kind of thing wasn’t fair game to play around with. It’s not Smith’s finest work, but it’s definitely one of my favorites, and plenty of lines both strangely poignant and silly have stuck with me.

One of my favorite poignant lines comes from Salma Hayek’s character.

“You people don’t celebrate your faith, you mourn it.”

“You people,” of course, are Catholics.

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To be Catholic, whether you’re devout and devoted or, as my parents would say, an a la carte Catholic, life still comes with some level of indoctrination, mostly in the form of instilling fear into the impressionable young Catholic heart.

One time I mentioned to a therapist that I went to Catholic school and she gave me a “Well there’s your problem” look/gesture.

Fear is part and parcel of Catholicism. The “balance” of this fear is laid out pretty well in an old George Carlin bit (who coincidentally plays the Cardinal in Dogma that sort of sets the whole plot in motion):

And the invisible man has a special list of 10 things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these 10 things, he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to suffer and live and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever until the end of time.

But he loves you.

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Growing up in a household that was Irish enough on one side to have Celtic memorabilia (i.e. any amount of Irish in the American Northeast), Irish music was frequently played. Traditional Irish folk music while my Mom cooked dinner or graded papers. Tapes in my grandparents’ car. Reflecting on it now as an adult, rather than when I was a child playing PS2 in the other room and therefore much more dialed into the Tony Hawk or Need For Speed: Underground soundtracks, I recognize a lot of the duality of Catholicism in these songs. The good and bad together.

God is, at once, your friend and your enemy. Your greatest ally and your greatest adversary. Sometimes the wind is at your back, other times you’re pushing against it. Two things are true at once.

You people don’t celebrate your faith, you mourn it.

Celebration and mourning occur simultaneously. They are not battling against one another, they are just each happening fully.

Someone else puts it better than I do.

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My favorite song of 2024, easily, is “Favourite” by Fontaines D.C.

Leave it to a band from Ireland to perfectly condense this feeling of mournful celebration, celebratory mournfulness, into a song that burrows itself so deeply into your brain that it might never come out.

Stitch and fall
The faces rearranged
You will see
Beauty give the way to something strange

Here’s where Fontaines frontman Grian Chatten puts it better than I do, saying this of the song in an interview with NME:

I can compare it to other tunes in terms of how they make me feel. ‘Perfect Day’ by Lou Reed and some Sigur Rós stuff – those tunes are like a warm pat on the back, but it is death itself. It’s like the final hug. I like the idea of a song being the saddest and happiest or the scariest and happiest song possible.

It’s not about a balance of something being 50 per cent this and 50 per cent that, but it being 100 per cent this while also 100 per cent that. ‘There She Goes’ [by The Las] is one of our biggest inspirations ever for that reason, ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ [by The Only Ones’] too. They’re endless but they’re also ephemeral. They’ve got to end as soon as the lights come on in the bar, but right now it’s forever. It is forever contained in a minute.

One time I was either reading an interview or listening to a podcast (can’t remember) with Michael Stipe from R.E.M., and he was talking about “Losing My Religion,” where he said that the song basically doesn’t have a chorus. It’s a journey. It tiptoes around the idea of a chorus, but instead just explores different rooms of a house never actually finding what you, the listener, are looking for (a chorus).

“Favourite” is perhaps the opposite of “Losing My Religion,” where it is all chorus. It’s all payoff. It is everything your body is screaming for. Where “Losing My Religion” doesn’t let you off the hook and give you the payoff your ears want so desperately, “Favourite” never even gives you space to yearn for the hook because it’s already there.

Relentlessly pummeling you with blow after blow of recognizing that what was here a second ago is gone, different, but it’s not all bad, but it’s not necessarily all good either.

Did you know
Cities on return are often strange?
Yeah, and now
Every time you blink, you feel it change

Yearning for something that’s already there, sad and happy at once, sounds a lot like nostalgia. Funny that the opposite example of a song I’m relating to Catholicism is “Losing My Religion,” huh? Didn’t even plan that.

Here’s a fun fact, “nostalgia” comes from Greek and means “pain from an old wound.” Nostalgic pain is a very specific pain. Bittersweet – wow, a compound word reflective of this duality of opposite emotions.

And the video for “Favourite” does a lot for the nostalgic feeling that’s already there. Here’s the thing with Fontaines D.C. Their first album only came out in 2019, but this is already their fourth. They’ve gone through so many iterations and aesthetic changes already. They’re creating their band arc at breakneck pace, so it’s kind of funny for guys who aren’t even 30 yet to be making a video that uses nostalgia as its visual aide.

It’s also interesting because after starting with their first album “Dogrel” and relying on a sort of stereotypical Irish aesthetic, they’ve progressed to where we are now with much more of a striking Nu Metal-influenced look for the “Romance” era. But it was clear that “Favourite” needed home movies rather than spiked hair and combat boots.

If the song already evoked the simultaneous emotions that Chatten said it would, the video cranks the dial and then breaks it off. You’re suddenly misty eyed mourning the loss of your own youth while feeling happy that you got to experience it at all. It’s really not fair.

It feels like cheating.

With each album they release, I keep finding a song that I confidently say is their best. On Dogrel it was “Too Real.” On “A Hero’s Death” it was the title track, whose repetition of the “Life ain’t always empty” mantra served me well during pandemic-era runs through an empty city where life felt particularly empty. And on Skinty Fia it was “Jackie Down the Line,” a masterclass in building and layering.

They went from “this band is pretty cool” to “this band is required listening and I can’t wait to see what they do next” in near record time.

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As an American who cannot reliably trace his Irish roots back, relating too hard to the culture, or what we perceive as the culture, is deeply embarrassing. You think of the guys who wear those hats. And I’d like the record to show that even when I was the target age for it at 14, I thought Boondock Saints fucking sucked. One time I saw a barista with the hand tats and I was chilled to my core.

But there’s something about this song, this band, this idea of battling with the very force or feeling that simultaneously lifts you up.

I still tap into it when I hear Irish traditional music somewhere, or bands like The Pogues or Flogging Molly (but never Dropkick Murphys). Or even when I have a Guinness and I know that drinking isn’t doing me any favors (especially when it’s [redacted] in the morning and I’m watching European soccer.)

And I tend not to think about god (unless it’s Alanis Morissette like in Dogma) too much in my free time, but I can instantly tap into a song where the central thesis is fearing falling from grace with God, a person who is their friend but also their enemy.

I’m not saying I feel it deeper than others. That’s the point here. The Irish or the Catholics don’t have a monopoly on guilt over feeling happy about something or a healthy mix of fear and love.

But, if you’ve been made to look at life through that lens long enough and during formative enough years, maybe you can feel something in songs that tap into that idea just a little bit more.

Or maybe not.

Two things can be true at once.

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