Every blade in the field,
Every leaf in the forest,
Lays down its life in its season,
As beautifully as it was taken up.
– Henry David Thoreau

The first time I heard anything by the Weakerthans was about this time last year, at a show in Regina during their Rolling Tundra tour. I’d only heard one song by the Weakerthans prior to that show (”The Reasons”) and it was on Canadian music channel MuchMusic’s “The Punk Show,” a half-hour program that aired too late at night to really matter. That had been in 2003, so two years had passed and the memory of its awesome chorus had faded into nothing except a vague hope that they would play it so I would remember it.

Of course they did. But they opened with an incredible song, a powerful and rambunctious declaration of their show’s purpose, the same song that opens 2003’s Reconstruction Site: “(Manifest).”

“(Manifest)” marks the commencement of Reconstruction Site. Rambunctious, proud, and defiant, it’s an excellent musical declaration of purpose. And John K. Samson, songwriter and lyricist, sings a sonnet—a sonnet—over top of it. While the instruments shout and clatter, Samson creates an atmosphere of a heated building in winter, a conversation with someone who is confined to their room. Trumpets close out the wordless, thirty-second coda as a call to arms. But still, at the end of the song, its meaning is oblique. To reveal its narrative, one has to look at the rest of the song cycle.

“(Hospital Vespers)” makes it more apparent. “Doctors played your dosage like a card trick,” Samson sings over a surreal, claustrophobic, wooshing version of the melody of “(Manifest).” Distantly, in alternating speakers, the next line is broadcast quietly, creating a sense of being disorientation which is only amplified by the music’s unusual, sliced quality. The sonnet in “(Hospital Vespers)” is evidently about someone in a hospital, needing the aforementioned medicine and possessing sunken eyes—and desperate, quiet faith. Samson’s character covers a security camera and turns to discover his loved one praying quietly. The song ends with struck piano chords, a sharp, melancholy contrast to the victorious trumpets in the previous song.

Which leaves us with one last piece to the song cycle. Samson has a healthy, triumphant life illustrated, and he’s captured marvelously the feeling of being in a hospital room with someone whose health is straddling a tricky line.

To discuss death, The Weakerthans close the album with “(Past-Due).” One last sonnet marks the friend’s February death, with Samson opening the obits to synthesized, bagpipe-esque noises. Touching vibe chords emphasize the sweet sadness inherent in lyrics discussing the feeling of seeing a friend’s face among others, anonymous on a single newspaper page, and of how little the picture captures who they really were. For an album that’s heavy on volume, “(Past-Due)” is a heartbreakingly subdued tune. It dissolves, after a little valiant clatter from the drums, into normal life. As the last, cavernous keyboard chord echoes and fades leaving only electronic bleeping, one pictures Samson putting the paper back on the table as sunlight, from the sky and reflected off snow, enters into his dining room somewhere in Winnipeg, and he leaves. He closes the album by trying to leave the dead behind, but the feeling lingers in the same way that the song lingers after the music has stopped.

From hope to tragic closure, Samson’s cycle suggests that maybe the best way to have no regrets when you lose a friend is to know them, to remember their tiny feet, to know what makes their sunken eyes roll, to remain with them throughout whatever tough times they need.

The true measure of a relationship, as implied by “(Past-Due),” is how much more you wish a photograph could show.

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