‘This Year’, we’re all going to make it through

This is probably my favourite trend on the Internet: every New Year, there is a surge of people posting the Mountain Goats’ ‘This Year’ on social media. They might add some words to their post about the year they’ve come out of or about the year they’re coming into; they might not add anything at all. It has the same message: the chorus’s heroic refrain “I am going to make it through this year, if it kills me.”

The verses go on to describe a horrific personal year of the singer, but the chorus is what matters most: it can fit anyone’s situation who feels like there’s a chance that they might not survive the year, it’s a rallying call to sing along to when they’re trying to find the strength to do so. The chords circle beautifully and the bass drives them on relentlessly; the drums are formed of a repeating snare that’s less monotonous and more the sound of feet stomping on forwards, regardless of anything they come across.

It’s a rallying call to sing along to when they’re trying to find the strength to survive the year

The Mountain Goats aren’t a huge band, but they aren’t small either: their celebrity fans include John Green, the author of The Fault in Our Stars, who calls them the best band on earth; Rian Johnson, who’s directed several of their music videos and is directing the next Star Wars film; and their ex-guitarist Annie Clarke of St. Vincent, who is inexplicably dating Cara Delevingne. Starting as a solo lo-fi project recorded on a tape cassette boombox by one guy with a cheap acoustic guitar, they’ve gradually built among the years to have a rabidly loyal fanbase who hinge on every word of a guy described by the New Yorker as the best non hip-hop lyricist in America, of a guy who released a book that wasn’t seen as a fun side-hobby but rather nominated for what’s arguably the most prestigious literary award in the USA. Their lyrics are defined by poetic play and sharp novelistic detail, but are most loved and remembered for their sheer, blunt emotional honesty.

‘This Year’ is the centrepiece of their album The Sunset Tree, a concept album concerning the band’s singer/songwriter John Darnielle’s relationship with his physically abusive stepfather as a teenager. The tracks take you through his anger and suffering, the consolation found in music, the emotional difficulty of coming to terms with the death of someone you’re ambivalent about, and so much more. It’s an album about one of the profound themes art can explore: simple survival. And when he sings about the difficulty and triumph of surviving a year, and each year after that, he’s someone who means it: he’s spoken before in interviews about the circumstances of his adolescence, where his stepfather would regularly beat him, where he put an ultimatum to John’s mother that either John would leave the house or he would, consequentially leaving John Darnielle homeless as a teenager. He fell into drug addiction, and robbed houses to fund it. He struggled with deep depression, and still does.

No matter how dire your situation gets, no matter how difficult it might seem to make it from day to day, you can survive, and things could get so much better than you could possibly anticipate

But he survived. He got clean, and was able to find shelter, and eventually trained as a nurse. Then he brought a guitar and a boombox and starting writing and recording songs. And now he has a family of his own – one much happier than the one he came from – and a successful career behind and in front of him. Within ‘This Year’, a song concerning a violent time when he was “17 years young”, he made an anthem for survival, and in himself, he created a perfect model for someone who is struggling to survive, to show that no matter how dire your situation gets, no matter how difficult it might seem to make it from day to day, you can survive, and things could get so much better than you could possibly anticipate.

So if you’re struggling in the early days of 2016, I recommend this song. Your story might not fit the story of the verse, but the chorus belongs to you, and everyone that does the most impressive thing.