The Songs of the Decade: "It's Not Just Me, It's Everybody" / "Welcome to My Island"
On loneliness, desire, and the two best songs of the decade (so far)
After nearly an entire month’s worth of dispatches—I’ve somehow already published more than twice the number of newsletters I did in 2024, between my own stuff and the guest pieces—we’ve made it: The two very best songs of the decade so far. But before we jump in, some sappiness:
Thank you to everyone who’s kept up with the series, and immense gratitude to guest writers , (Justin Nava), , , , and for lending their inimitable voices to this project of mine. You all should follow all of their Substacks and/or wherever else they drop their art (Nava’s IG, Emil’s Letterboxd, Ashley’s website, Niki’s excellent new EP on Spotify and Apple Music, etc.).
This has been one of the most fun things I’ve done in my 10+ years of on-and-off culture writing, from essentially writing 10 essays in the span of a month (probably the most prolific I’ve ever been, even including college) to getting to collaborate with 6 of my favorite artists and take-havers.
Here’s the full playlist of the 100 Best Songs of the 2020s (So Far).
In case you missed any of our prior newsletters for this series so far:
Top 10 (all by me): “TLC Cagematch” / “Casual” | “American Teenager” / “People, I’ve been sad” | “Silk Chiffon” / “anything” | “Hard Drive” / “Somewhere Near Marseilles” | “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” / “Welcome to My Island”
Guests: “Starburned and Unkissed” by Gian Balangue | 3 K-Pop Songs by Justin Nava | “Huwag Muna Tayong Umuwi” / “The Loneliest Time” by Emil Hofileña | “My Love Mine All Mine” by Ashley Ranich | “Billions” by Niki Colet | “party 4 u” / “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” by Currie McKinley
2. Weyes Blood - “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody”
Before the song, some relevant lore…
Back in 2022, I wrote an introductory note to my usual salvo of end-of-year round-ups that attempted to summarize the year I had lived under the umbrella of loneliness, a theme that had threaded through both my life and most of my favorite art from then. In it, I defined loneliness as follows:
It is a gravity that emanates from us, beckoning us to enter into the orbits of others, to open ourselves up to be seen and understood or read to filth, to feel that twinge of the divine that comes with loving and being loved. So elemental is this force that I can’t seem to stop describing it in terms reserved for physics textbooks: This desire to know and be known.
It is a bit more than two years later now, but I still stand by all of this, even as the intervening time has often seen me fall short of the ideals it espouses, as people do. I return to it often, as one of a handful of pieces I wrote during what I like to call my “lucid period”: A moment of profound philosophical clarity when it felt easy to say with my full chest exactly what it meant for me to live a good life. Life has a way of obscuring all that, so I’m glad I left myself plenty of little notes, whether written by me or others.
I find that same philosophical clarity in Natalie Mering / Weyes Blood’s “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody”, itself one of my favorite pieces of art from that year. Inextricably a COVID-19 song even as it traffics in timeless and universal themes, the song sees Mering—accompanied by gentle piano—conducting exploratory heart surgery on herself, cracking her ribcage open to discover whether or not a heart mired in darkness could truly turn aglow.
From the start, the song works in a tender register, as Mering recounts feeling lonely at a party: Oh, it’s been so long since I felt really known. It is an evergreen sentiment, borne out of the communal alienation prevalent in modern living even before the pandemic forced us to literally retreat into ourselves. It is a verse rooted in the I, underscoring the orbit of the self from which we must escape in order to get back in touch with others and the world at large.
From this point of almost cocooned isolation, the song becomes a journey of emergence, as the second verse expands the world of the song from an isolated moment to an era of “overwhelming changes”. It bridges the I and the we both through their shared estrangement with each other (We’ve all become strangers / Even to ourselves) and the suggestion that perhaps there never was a demarcation between them to begin with (Every wave might not be the same / But it’s all a part of one big thing). Taken together, these lines paint the picture of a society divorced from itself and each other—a spiritual schism not borne of our years-long period of global physical isolation but undoubtedly exacerbated by it.
The chorus brings with it the central and titular realization of the song, spelled out simply and plainly through Mering’s economical lyricism: It’s not just me, it’s everybody. It is a rebuke to those obsessively looking inward at their own pain and loneliness—including Mering herself—and a reminder that if there is anything we all share, it is some kind of pain and loneliness. The third verse reiterates (Yes, we all bleed the same way) and elaborates (Has a time ever been more revealing / That the people are hurting?) on this and offers a way out: Mercy is the only cure for being so lonely.
What does mercy look like? Mering leaves that open-ended, but I would like to think mercy resembles grace, for both yourself and others. It is in providing yourself with the grace to take those clumsy baby steps re-entering the world, and providing the world with the grace to believe that it is doing the same.
Later in the piece above, I wrote:
Listen to your loneliness, then, and do not let your past lock you away from life. There is a bigger world out there than the one that met your vulnerability with coldness. Allow yourself to imagine that world again. Let your loneliness make you brave.
The world is not as cruel as you might think. After all, you are in it.
It’s not just you; it’s everybody.
1. Caroline Polachek - “Welcome to My Island”
Throughout this entire suite, there has been an implicit question that each write-up has grappled with, whether directly or indirectly: What makes a great pop song? Through 19 different essays about 19 different songs, my guest writers and I have come up with 19 variations of an answer, but unfortunately for my 6 always-brilliant but occasionally-dissenting friends, because this is my newsletter I will be the one getting the last word on the matter:
All great pop songs are about desire.
This isn’t just for the sake of narrative convenience. Desire has permeated this series, from the sweet confections of “Silk Chiffon” and “Super Shy” to the saltier, more complicated variations on “Casual” and “The Loneliest Time”. Desire is why charli throws that party, and why Hikaru Utada books that room with a view. It extends beyond the sexual too, as “American Teenager” speaks to a desire for salvation and “People I’ve been sad” to a desire for understanding. Even a song like “My Love Mine All Mine” cannot help but be about desire in how it talks about being free of it. There is even a meta dimension at play here, as the very act of writing a song (or 600 words on one) is itself borne out of a desire to express something in one’s gut that demands to be spoken.
Given all of that, what else could close us out but a track whose soaring, Icarus-like chorus goes: Desire, I want to turn into you?
Not that “Welcome to My Island” doesn’t earn this spot on merit alone. Caroline Polachek’s music has always stood out from her peers’ not just because of her virtuosic, crystalline voice, but also because of her eagerness to use her voice as more than just a vehicle for her lyrics. In an interview with The Ringer, Polachek talks about the genesis of the song being her frustrations with the limitations of traditional narrative lyricism: “[I] wanted to just do something that was hyper-expressionistic…It didn’t make sense, but it felt so right”. Her use of art jargon makes particular sense here, as Polachek employs her voice as a paintbrush throughout the song, daubing brash and bold strokes onto an aural canvas, less an attempt at explaining a feeling than it is at evoking one.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in its opening moments. Had “Welcome to My Island” ended after its first 30 seconds, it might have still earned a high spot on this list. You can find all of pop music in the primal howl that kicks it off: The overwhelming, all-encompassing clarion call of a desire that resists intellectualization and outpaces human language. There is not a single intelligible word to be found in there, only a sustained and self-emptying relinquishing of an immense breath that has grown too unbearable to hold in. In the same way that inhalation demands exhalation, desire—real, bone-deep desire—demands to be made spoken.
The rest of the song builds on this push-and-pull rhythm, flitting between extremes while held together only by a ubiquitous drum pattern and Polachek’s chameleonlike voice. Subdued, almost incantatory verses fall into pirouetting, aerodynamic choruses: Desire, I want to turn into you. A Debbie Harry-esque spoken-word bridge recounts a remembered admonishment—It’s all your fault, and it’s all your mess / And you’re all alone, can’t go to bed—before erupting into a final consummation, amid a rollicking guitar line and that familiar, untethered voice:
Desire!*~
Through every iteration of this 100-track list, “Welcome to My Island” has occupied the top spot. Every other song has shifted hither or yon, but this one has always felt like the lodestar for this entire project, a notion that was reinforced not only by the thematic alignment outlined above but also by two of my guest writers, through their own volition, also choosing Caroline Polachek songs as their subjects. Even before it made sense—before we spilled thousands of words on this newsletter to make it all make sense—it already felt so right.
(In a fun coincidence, Weyes Blood actually appears in the music video for this song.)
And that’s a wrap! Drop a line below if you enjoyed the series, think the ranking is all wrong, or just want to say hey.