This album and this song specifically arrived to my doorstep at the most relevant time it could've. A album about reminiscing the long gone good days and a song about saying goodbye to them, right as I was about to graduate high school? It couldn't have been timed better.
This song is no doubt a well made one, but I can't deny that a significant factor for why I love this song so much is its sentiment. It didn't hit me the first time I heard it but when it did, it hit me really hard. It wasn't the feeling of future nostalgia that emanated from Gone Are The Good Days, or the hopeful outlook of Bitter, themes that were relevant and popped up throughout the album, but it was this hard to explain sense of bittersweet acceptance. This song resonated with the feeling I had in my soul nearing the end of my high school journey that I was struggling to identify.
It was a goodbye, not happy, not sad, but somewhere in between. Lines like "This is my soundtrack to the end" and "I can finally say we're in the last act" embodied this personal concept of bidding farewell to the best part of my life, one that I loved with all my heart and soul but couldn't bear to live in any longer. All the highs and lows that defined me, all the pain and laughter that forever reverberates in my bones, this song managed to explain what it meant to look back at it all and smile knowing it's been done.
Maybe it's because of the experiences I've had in my high school life as a performer, as a dancer. The concept of life being "like a movie" and having a "soundtrack to the end" for this chapter of my life felt tremendously touching, at least to me. I'm sure Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! has had similar experiences to be writing this song, and this album as a whole, seeing that these themes have been so beautifully written and woven into the lyrics.
There's this undertone of a broken person finding themselves at the end of the story, after all they've been through, that runs through this song, and I'd like to think that's how it's meant to be interpreted. There's no vibrant and cheerful overtones, no happy ending vibes coming from this song, but it has this sense of being able to finally rest.
Sentiment aside, it's a powerful song and a perfect fit for an album closer, especially one that's about better days. Despite the connotations of easycore, I admire how they manage to portray all these emotions in their music so innately. There's this overlaying aura of monumentalism that blankets this track so affectionately, as if this song knew it was meant to be sentimental. A strong yet weary voice, a reverb-laden guitar tone that perfectly encapsulates nostalgia in a soundscape, and a perfect balance of intensity throughout the song to parallel the emotional journey of this kind of goodbye.
I know it's not exactly a music critic, but I've never been one to enjoy the idea of criticising, and frankly, this blog has always been about my personal musical journey, so take it as it is. I'd be clueless as to if this song is honestly that good without the sentiment, but like rose-tinted glasses permanently welded to my face, I can't see it as anything else but perfect and one of the most tragically beautiful songs to grace my soul (Although if you ask me, I'd still tell you this song is really that good even without the sentiment). And to solidify how sentimental this song is, I used this song as the soundtrack to my own high school journey trip-down-memory-lane video, because nothing else captured the essence as well as this song did. So there.
Rating: 5/5