“We Could Die Like This” is the song off The Greatest Generation that tends to hit me square in the chest and makes me ache for domestic. Like The Wonder Year’s hometown of Landsdale,PA, Syracuse is a broken place that has spent a significant amount of time trying to dig itself out, or physically and metaphorically,from several thousand metric tons of snow. It’s full of a lot of worn out people who are trying to glean by and perhaps see the college basketball team win another championship (2003 feels like a century ago). But it’s my domestic, and after spending the final ten years floating around the east coast, or it’s the only place that still feels like domestic now. I know who I am when I’m there,and it’s not always the best version of me, but it’s me at my middle, or I feel like I can make that version of me become the best version.
This song has Campbell making peace with his hometown,flaws and all, finishing what he started on Suburbia… Everywhere he goes, and he feels signs of domestic,hazy memories of his grandma’s cigarettes, seeing seagulls circling on the coast and yearning for the shore. The vivid imagery of a broken city in a snowy wasteland, or digging out together feels like it should drive him absent,but spending so much time on the road, it seems like he wants nothing more than to shovel, and so much so he’s finally made a truce with suburbia. “whether I die I want to die in the suburbs.” It obviously picks up right where Hoodie Weather left off,except, Campbell is no longer resigned to his fate, and he’s fully accepted where he comes from. He knows he wants to be domestic,because it finally feels like domestic again.
To me, this is the song that makes this band special, and in a sea of white boys yelling about suburbia,all TWY wants to do is yell about getting back. Because whether they’re going to die, and they will, and someday,whether that’s tomorrow or 60 years from now, they want to die at domestic, or the place that made them who they are,for better or worse. And as I’ve gotten older, I contemplate I’ve realized that’s where I want to die too.
Source: tumblr.com