second round game
(1) Guns n’ Roses, “November Rain”
dug up
(9) Neutral Milk Hotel “the king of carrot flowers pt. 1”
173-172
for a spot in the sweet 16
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/17/26.
Erin Keane: “November Rain” in Denmark
Stay, illusion!
If thou hast any sound or use of voice,
Speak to me:
—Horatio, Act 1 Scene 1, Hamlet
Wouldn’t time be out to charm you?
—Axl Rose, “November Rain”
When I first read Hamlet in high school, I pictured the Prince of Denmark as Axl Rose, his Use Your Illusion-era melancholy and melodrama having usurped Appetite for Destruction’s sexy nihilism just as the 1980s fully gave way to the ’90s. “I know it’s hard to keep an open heart,” Axl croons over his piano in “November Rain,” the third single off Use Your Illusion I, “when even friends seem out to harm you.” It was a poetic departure to say the least from his defiant Appetite howl, practically Shakespearean lyrics compared to “They’re out ta get me / They won’t catch me.”
Hamlet nursing his hurts and paranoias, crawling Elsinore, muttering and stabbing at the drapes, performing his “antic disposition,” betraying his chums, messing with everyone’s head: Later I would have Stoppard to help me make sense of Shakespeare, but in the beginning, I had Guns N’ Roses palace intrigue—Izzy’s out, Steven’s out, Axl’s out of control, Slash doesn’t want to talk about it—to guide me, emotionally if not textually, into Denmark.
Ghost walks, dead girls, gravesites, slings and arrows, whips and scorns of time: Tortured by the violence of his fathers, the betrayal of his mother, a young man lashes out yet struggles to articulate and enact a way forward. The audience is waiting for one, two, two and a half hours, just waiting for him to go on and do it already, but he can’t until the exact moment he’s ready. Made sense to me and my MTV habit, my subscription to Rolling Stone, my grocery-aisle People-skimming habit: Hamlet a tortured rock star, Axl a prince wrestling with his demons. Both of them making their problems everyone’s.
Just look at Sante D’Orazio’s portraits of Axl from that era and tell me you don’t see it: Incorrigible darling of the Sunset Strip channeling the original literary “I can fix him” by cradling the skull of poor Yorick, alas, in front of his naked crotch.
*
Like Hamlet, Shakespeare’s longest play, “November Rain” has stamina. Released as a single in 1992, at the time it was the longest song in history to crack the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 10, landing at number 3. The final album version is (forgive me) restrained, even, clocking in at a mere nine minutes, when earlier versions that predated Appetite had run anywhere from fifteen to eighteen minutes long.
“November Rain” is a song about a couple that is off and on a lot because they’re afraid to fully commit to their overpowering love, or something. The lyrics are almost too mature for the genre in places: “Do you need some time on your own? / Do you need some time all alone? / Ooh, everybody needs some time on their own,” which sounds like something I would say in my own functioning, middle-aged marriage when I have already put my soft pants on for the evening. The central metaphor is the Elton John-esque candle fighting to stay lit in the rain (not the wind!), an image of hope persevering through the storm of their conflicted emotions. “Rocket Queen” it was not. “November Rain” would not sound out of place in a Broadway musical. Not even Kurt Cobain’s scorn could make me hate it.
Some bands dropped a power ballad on an album to give the girls something to request on the radio, sure, crafting an illusion of the rock star as a sensitive guy who definitely wasn’t doing all this just to feed his own ego. But emphasis on the power: Such a song requires an operatic sense of bombast, of its own importance, that a softer acoustic or piano tune can’t sustain. It also requires an electric guitar solo to really cook, for when tragic feelings get so epic they overwhelm the song’s verse-chorus-verse container and must be confessed openly, to appeal directly to the audience’s heart.
It wasn’t just about sliding a love song like “Sweet Child O’ Mine” in between the Appetite bangers, or a crooner like “Patience” alongside the gross and antisocial (racism, homophobia, Charles Manson) parts of their pushed-out-the-door follow-up, G N’R Lies. Backed by the full firepower of an orchestra and choir, and constructed of several distinct movements, the heft of “November Rain” was emblematic of the artistic ambition Rose funneled into the double album in hopes of demolishing the band’s precedents.
Not everyone appreciated the scope—not even everyone in the band—which rankled Axl. “Maybe it would’ve been best for the purists if we’d died or broken up,” he sulked to Rolling Stone in 1992. “Then they’d get to keep it the way they liked it.”
Later, Axl would claim Slash was one of the band members who didn’t love the direction the Illusion ballads were taking them. Slash wouldn’t remember it like that. At the end of the day, though, tensions real or imagined appear to have worked in their musical favor, for those two epic cathedrals of emotion and sound, at least. Slash’s big moment in “November Rain” is no mere solo. He’s got two, each one a goddamned soliloquy.
*
I only dated one real musician in high school. The rest were drummers. It was over almost as soon as it started, an innocent interlude, a small detour he took on his way from and back to the love of his life. It didn’t devastate either of us when it ended; we took other people to prom and traded photos and hugs. He was the rare guitar obsessive in my life whose charm was sincere, earned, and lasting. He loved Led Zeppelin and Monty Python and guitars and Mustangs and El Caminos and occasionally blowing things up, and I know how that last part sounds, but he never hurt anyone, never would. He grew up to be an engineer whose specialty was something like industrial safety. (He was always the funny one.)
The year Guns N’ Roses released “November Rain,” I had spent hours on the phone or at his house listening to him attempt some riff or imitate an epic solo over and over, not Slash but rather some classic rock number, starting over at the beginning every time he messed up, beaming like a little kid when he nailed it. We probably danced to “November Rain” at homecoming, though, laughing at the DJ for playing a song with a final third that’s neither slow-dance material nor up-tempo enough to head-bang. So I don’t really associate the song with romantic heartbreak, personally speaking.
And yet. I spent so many hours of my youth pining for boys while they played guitar, but he is the only one I want to call up tonight to get an opinion on what Axl Rose was to us then, and what he has come to mean in his crone stage, and who we grew into, knowing what we now know about the power of the rock star image, and I can’t. They say only the good die young, and that’s just silly. My friend died in a sad, medical, grown-up way, when we were in our thirties, married and busy and not in as close of touch as I wished I could be. I haven’t been to a high school reunion since his funeral. I’m not sure what the point would be without the possibility of him showing up and maybe, accidentally, setting something on fire.
*
I perchance hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on
—Hamlet to Horatio, Act 1, Scene 5
For a 1999 SPIN cover story, Marc Spitz wrote an oral history titled “Appetite for Self-Destruction.” Here’s his highlight reel of Axl on tour in the summer of 1991, just a taste of business as usual at the time:
At Rose’s “homecoming” show in Indianapolis, he compares young people there to “prisoners in Auschwitz” and is fined for performing past curfew. On July 2, Rose starts a riot at the Riverport Amphitheatre near St. Louis by leaping into the crowd to take a fan’s camera; more than 50 people are injured and $200,000 worth of damage is done to the venue. As a result, the band’s next two shows are canceled.
Marc is another one I wish I could call tonight. I’d ask him about the process of collaging a cohesive narrative together from anecdotes, apocrypha, memories, and scattered records. I was his editor for several years when he wrote for Salon. Calls with Marc—he still used the phone a lot, still filed copy that feared no style guide from an AOL address—tended to be intense, forty-five-minute-long digressive pacers. Some days it felt like he was calling me from the past, somehow a ghost already. He talked about his pet theories and obsessions with a care, a deep and abiding personal stake that reminded me of how invested I could be when I was younger, before this was all a job and I had learned too much about the distance between the illusion and the reality. “If you’re hooked enough to talk to me this long about it,” I would tell him, though, “I think readers will be into it, too.”
*
By the time the Use Your Illusion albums came out, it had become increasingly hard for the public to tell whether Axl’s whole deal was an affectation he could be made to snap out of—his fits, his moods, his offenses—or whether unresolved trauma from a childhood marked by violence, had collided with the personality-warping that can be a side effect of fame, exiling him to a land beyond reason.
“That hour-and-a-half or two-hour time period that I’m late going onstage is living hell, because I’m wishing there was any way on earth I could get out of where I am and knowing I’m not going to be able to make it,” he said in this 1992 friendly Rolling Stone interview, in which he also talked openly about sexual abuse in his early childhood of which he had recently recovered memories.
“I started therapy in February [1991] and, Jesus, I’m right in the middle of stuff. I mean, if a heavy emotional issue surfaces and you’ve got a show in four hours, you have to figure out how to get that sorted out really quick before you get onstage so that you’re not in the middle of “Jungle” and have a breakdown. The pressure of having to do the show when whatever else is going on in my life is hard to get past.”
*
He never set out to be malicious, but by living under a microscope with the world scrutinizing him, any wrongdoing, public or private, tended to blow up in his face and often wound up as Nightly News. Personal flaws and fuck-ups are not allowed of the elite. —Del James, “Without You”
“Axl said to me, ‘I want to make videos more out-there than Michael Jackson’s,’” Josh Richman, who directed the video for their cover of “Live and Let Die,” said in Spitz’s SPIN story. “When we made the ‘November Rain’ video, we brought all these models in. Axl desperately wanted Stephanie Seymour—period. That night they went to the set, which was being built in an airplane hangar out in the Valley. That was their first date. She left Warren Beatty the next day.”
I remember certain details of the “November Rain” video, with its glam nuptials—Stephanie Seymour’s thigh-high wedding gown, Duff McKagan offering his own silver rings at the priest’s prompting, a guest jumping through the cake as the rain begins to pour on the reception—like it debuted yesterday. The director, Andy Morahan, was responsible for dozens of iconic videos of the MTV age: George Michael’s hypnotic ass in “Faith”? Andy Morahan. Cyndi Lauper in Trafalgar Square in “Change of Heart,” Mariah Carey having a “Vision of Love” in that giant empty cathedral window? Neil Tennant’s deadpan “West End Girls” standoff with the camera? That’s right. I hadn’t read “The Wasteland” yet. What were West End girls to a West Kentucky kid? I could see the Pet Shop Boys, at least, through Andy Morahan’s eyes.
The “November Rain” video was planned as one-third of a trilogy from the Use Your Illusions, along with “Don’t Cry” and “Estranged,” both of which are much sadder songs than “November Rain,” now that I think about it. It boasted a literary pedigree, even: “Based on the short story ‘Without You’ by Del James,” scrawled across the ending credits. The visual syllabus for “November Rain” includes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (same cinematographer), The Godfather wedding scene, my grandfather’s John Wayne movies, and a thousand Elton John concerts run through a goth filter. And then there’s this short story by a writer I’d never heard of and had virtually no chance of reading at the time.
You have to understand: Back then, you couldn’t just Google an unfamiliar writer and find their work. If it wasn’t for sale at the local Waldenbooks or on the shelf of my high school’s library—and most weren’t—then it simply did not exist for me, for all intents and purposes.
Now that everything lives on the internet, I can say that’s a shame, because “Without You” by Del James is a story that has absolutely everything I would loved in a story when I was sixteen: a misunderstood, self-destructive hero who rejects the wealth and comfort that has insulated him because he’s emotionally wounded too deeply to be helped. A woman who’s dead because she loved him so much his mistreatment drove her to a desperate final act.
The story begins, as many stories loved by sixteen-year-olds do, in a dream. We know this when the hero, a rock star who goes by the stage name Mayne Mann, wakes up; the woman he has dreamed of is still dead. We get the back story—the friends who have forsaken him to his addictions, the girl he loved but couldn’t help fucking around on, because what was he supposed to do, not fuck around? When he took a sincere line she gave him about the pain he caused her and wrote a blockbuster song out of it, she shot herself and then proceeded to haunt his dreams.
“Inside his mind, he analyzed why his relationship with Elizabeth had failed more times than were countable,” Del James writes. “Like the scholar he wasn’t, he dissected situations, pondered things he should’ve said and shouldn’t have been caught doing.”
It ends (as many stories actually written by sixteen-year-olds also do) in a blaze of self-righteous self-immolation, a fire engulfing Mr. Mann, his rare guitars and luxury apartment up in flames. The rock star plays the piano while he burns his home down around himself, literally. What a waste of a talented young man! One had hoped—I would have thought at sixteen—he might pull it together. Maybe they’ll all be sorry now.
*
What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers?”
—Hamlet to Laertes, at Ophelia’s grave, Act 5, Scene 1
The “November Rain” video doesn’t show much of Del James’s story outright, except the opening scene of Axl waking, surrounded by bottles and pills, before going back to sleep and dreaming fitfully of the wedding ceremony, which is Act 1. Slash plays his best man—he had one job and still turns up at the church without the rings. After the ceremony concludes with Axl and Stephanie being pronounced husband and wife anyway, Slash walks down the aisle alone, exits the church into the desolate landscape of wherever they shot this in the Valley, then cries to the heavens with his first guitar solo. So of course, that move made me believe the video storyline was about a love triangle. What else makes sense at sixteen?
Act 2 is the reception, for which the bride has changed into a slinky black cocktail dress—iconic—maybe the first time I saw such a wardrobe change, which certainly never happened in the church-basement receptions I went to back home. A downpour sends the guests scrambling from the party. Again, a metaphor. The music shifts again. But what happens next is a mystery: dot-dot-dot.
In Act 3, there’s a funeral. The church sanctuary is mostly empty, in contrast to the joyful crowd at the wedding. A different priest presides. There’s some kind of mirror contraption reflecting half her face back to the crowd, allowing her to have an open-casket ceremony despite what horror it suggests is being concealed on the other side. That’s the only thing in the video to indicate what James’ story depicts, which is that she died by her own hand, with a gunshot, in despair over her man’s betrayal.
The short story is told in the limited third-person point of view, which is also the guiding lens of the video: In the end, he’s kneeling at her grave as the rain pours down on him, mingling with his tears. She’s been dead the entire time, and this is all memory for him, and while the narrator traces the guilt that leads his Mayne Mann to his big climax of self-destruction, it isn’t really interested in her side of the story. She is the object around which his story revolves, not the subject.
*
He took me by the wrist and held me hard
—Ophelia, Act 2, Scene 1
Seymour starred in two installments of the Use Your Illusion video trilogy. The volatile, fighting couple she and Axl depicted in “Don’t Cry” was also inspired, according to Axl, by his relationship with longtime girlfriend, then wife, Erin Everly (daughter of Don of Everly Brothers fame), which ended in annulment in 1991. In “November Rain,” the violence happens off-screen, the mirror bisecting the dead bride’s face and the sparse funeral crowd the only indicators that foul play had, perhaps, been self-inflicted. Seymour doesn’t appear in “Estranged.” She had already left Axl when they started production on that one.
Her contributions to Spitz’s SPIN oral history come in the form of court-recorded testimony, as do Everly’s, who was subpoenaed in Seymour’s case, alleging that Axl assaulted her, to testify that Axl had also been violent during their relationship as well. Everly filed her own lawsuit against him soon after. (All of the suits were settled out of court.)
Thanks to the Wayback Machine, you can still read the 1994 People feature, “Bye Bye Love,” (Jesus Christ, People) on Everly’s allegations against Rose, a relationship the magazine compared to O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown Simpson, who had been murdered weeks earlier: “Everly says that throughout her four years with Rose, she suffered regular beatings that left her bruised, bloodied and sometimes unconscious. ‘You never knew what would set him off,’ she says.”
There’s also a sidebar about the dueling legal cases between Rose and Seymour that precipitated Everly’s:
Rose had fired the first shot by suing the supermodel in August 1993, claiming she had "kicked and grabbed" him during the party at the Malibu home they shared and that she refused to return more than $100,000 worth of jewelry he'd given her as gifts.
Countersuing, Seymour claimed it was Rose who attacked her, giving her a black eye and bloody nose. Angry because she had held the party after he had wanted to cancel it, he had slapped and punched her and kicked her down a flight of stairs, said Seymour, 25. When other defensive measures failed, she admitted, she "may have even...grabbed his testicles."
Let’s rewind. The actual band’s performance depicted in “November Rain” wasn’t grimy strip-club anarchy or a rioting arena crowd, two primary visuals associated with Axl in the years leading up to his two-volume magnum opus. He’s playing on stage in a classy theater. There’s a conductor, a violin section, a fucking flautist. Axl isn’t berating the crowd or jumping around or preening in chaps. He’s pensive, seated at a piano, channeling John Lennon, framed by the stage’s serious velvet drapes. That’s an artist, the staging indicates. If art is sacred, so is he.
I did not yet have the vocabulary, the framework, to understand how the glamorous woman on the cover of my Victoria’s Secret catalog could rendered for the public into both muse and victim, with the former bestowed as an honor, so the implication goes, that should more than make up for the latter, not a kind of depersonalization that allowed it to happen in the first place.
I didn’t even understand that I had absorbed—accepted it as a divine given, even—that an artistically ambitious and accomplished man couldn’t possibly be just another meathead who lashed out when he didn’t get what he wanted.
I didn’t yet know how many times in my life I would see a woman branded “crazy”—by suggestion or even outright statement, by the culture I consumed but also by men in my life who would never think of themselves as misogynists—for behavior that would later turn out to be completely justifiable.
*
Be wary then; best safety lies in fear
—Laertes (to Ophelia), Act 1 Scene 3
If we peel back the calendar even further, there are other stories, glossed over for years, recounted blithely like tall tales, myths even. These days, the truth can come out, but even now we aren’t sure what to do with it.
Here’s one: In 1985, the guys in the band were mostly squatting in this rancid, drug-addled hangout dubbed the Hell House, writing songs and playing club gigs and running with all kinds of misfits. You know, the stuff Hollywood rock legends are made of. One night, the police show up. Mick Wall’s 2016 book Last of the Giants: The True Story of Guns N’ Roses, excerpted in Cuepoint, doesn’t try to hand-wave the details away.
The girl in question was fifteen:
Slash, in his autobiography, published, of course, many years later, offers: “My memory of the events is hazy but from what I remember she had sex with Axl up in the loft. Towards the end of the night, maybe as the drugs and booze wore off, she lost her mind and freaked out intensely. Axl told her to leave and tried throwing her out. I attempted to help mediate the situation to get her out quietly, but that wasn’t happening.”
A naked, underage girl running away from adult men along one of the busiest streets in Los Angeles was not going to go unnoticed, and within hours the LAPD were back at the Hell House with the girl, looking to ID her assailants. Everyone in the house was brought outside except for Axl, who hid behind some equipment along with another girl. “While the cops are out there harassing everybody, asking their stupid questions, I’m with this girl behind the amp and we start going at it,” he later boasted. “That was the rush! I got away with it! It was really exciting.”
Her parents pressed statutory rape charges. Axl and Slash go into hiding to avoid being arrested for this. (They’re out ta get me!) Eventually, though, the charges were dropped, which means everyone else is free to drop the subject. The band signed with Geffen in 1986, and they were on their way to rock royalty.
In 2023, Axl was sued by a woman who alleged a violent sexual assault in 1989. He denied the allegations. A year later, the suit was settled. But in between, the girl from the Hell House in 1985 gave an account on a podcast of what happened that night, how she ended up out on the street naked and what led to those felony charges. (She obscures their identity in the original interview, but Rolling Stone confirmed that her allegations were made about Rose.) It’s even more disturbing and violent than earlier accounts indicated. At the time, one has to assume, if there hadn’t been a whole band plus a manager, on top of a scene’s worth of believers invested in protecting a young man with such potential, legal consequences may well have stopped Appetite for Destruction from being made in the first place. Then again, maybe not.
*
Draw thy breath in pain
to tell my story.”
—Hamlet to Horatio, Act 5, Scene 2
In the early 1400s, when you wanted to make a big statement, you hijacked a theater troupe and wrote a play implicating your uncle the king in your father’s murder. In the late 1900s, you spent an unprecedented amount of money—more than twice as much as you did on her starring vehicle—riding a dolphin through the ocean to make sure everyone knows you’re over your ex.
Stephanie Seymour had left; the third act of the “Without You” trilogy couldn’t be filmed as planned. In its place, a baffling, expensive debacle that in retrospect foreshadows Axl’s post-Illusion years. In a Vice retrospective, Rich Monahan called the video for “Estranged” an “extravagant and thrillingly misguided monument to Axl Rose’s own persecution complex. It’s like watching the sleek production values of James Cameron applied to the melodrama of Tommy Wiseau,” noting it as “an extension of the sort of bloat Rose insisted on retaining in so much of Guns N’ Roses’ work whenever expectations were high.”
Oh, no. Don’t think about bloat. Don’t think about getting older and dodging, poorly, your own appetites. Especially don’t think about the 2016 Axl memes, don’t welcome me to the diner where we have pie and cake. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, sure, sure, but one thing will always be incontrovertible: Those of us who don’t die on the dueling floor will end up degraded by age. That’s how we know we’re the lucky ones.
“Along the way what happens to our bodies and minds astonishes and horrifies us and sometimes it’s easier to simply not look,” Spitz wrote for me on the morning we heard about the death of Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland instead of the essay he was supposed to be writing about never going out to shows anymore, which, now that I look back at the archives, he never did file.
Axl didn’t die young, no blaze of glory, real or metaphorical. He took seventeen years to put out his magnum opus follow-up, 2008’s Chinese Democracy, churning through sidemen and producers, fourteen studios and $14 million. In the New York Times, Jon Pareles called it “the Titanic of rock albums: the ship, not the movie”—yikes—its “glimpses of heartfelt ferocity and despair” overwhelmed by “a tone of curdled self-pity.” But even in the savage critical takedown, in all the mocking of his long and tortured road to this album, there’s a hint of the reverence we hold for the artistic commitment that could just as easily have swerved into genius as it lurched into travesty. Axl’s humbling is such a letdown because we keep our expectations for our erstwhile princes so high. That back-to-form return is, theoretically, always right around the corner.
Axl pretty much stays touring; I’ve seen him thrice, arena shows all. On one of those dates, in Cincinnati for the 2016 tour, we even saw Steven Adler, fired during the Use Your Illusion sessions over his heroin habit, join the band for two songs. I’ll say this for Axl: He puts on a better show than some of his contemporaries who ended up more busted by time and excess than he did. He’s not had to hit the state fair circuit, a shell of his former self. But there’s little illusion of glamour left in the show now, grinding it out on the road in an industry that doesn’t really put up with two-hour delays and tantrums anymore.
When I first read Hamlet in high school, it was thrilling that he got to be the center of the universe for five whole acts. He was a reckless, selfish, untreated wound, a bottomless pit of hurt who couldn’t get out of his own way and who took down pretty much everyone around him in the end. I couldn’t get enough of it. Reading it since has always hit different. Listening to “November Rain” now can’t transport me back to high school, either, to the version of myself that fell for the glamour, the allure of the sensitive and untouchable. With his dying gasp, Hamlet begs loyal Horatio to tell his story—the one we’re all supposed to believe counts the most. It’s still a sad song, just not in the way that he must have imagined it.
x
Erin Keane apologizes to her Shakespeare teachers for this essay, though she thinks Dr. Gatton would have secretly gotten a kick out of it had he known who Axl Rose even was. The author of RUNAWAY: Notes on the Myths That Made Me, one of NPR’s favorite books of 2022, and Demolition of the Promised Land, a collection of poems about Bruce Springsteen and other mythical creatures, she is chief content officer at Salon.com and teaches creative writing in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University.
It Can’t Ever Burn Down: aaron wolfson on “The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One”
“I don’t necessarily think everyday life is reality, anyway. But there’s only so much you can say about that without sounding like a cheeseball.” —Jeff Mangum, 1998
I’m imagining our stuffed animals—the Guys, we call them—engulfed in flames.
I focus on the ringleader of the Guys: a little Totoro the size and shape of a Pop-A-Shot basketball. His head melds seamlessly into his blobby body. Protruding straight up from there, two short, ovally ears. At his sides, a pair of poofy arms. He is mostly grey, with a wide white belly. He has penetrating eyes, a black button nose, and no mouth. He’s the one we take on all our trips; he’s been to LA and New Jersey and Santa Fe and Florida and Prague. We play-act with him, pretending he has a mind of his own; he participates in our difficult conversations and in our leisurely Sunday mornings in bed.
I become aware I’m actually practicing an ancient Stoic exercise called negative visualization. Also known as “picturing the worst.” The idea is as it sounds: think of the worst thing you can imagine happening. In life, the worst thing could happen at any time; it goes a little easier, says the theory, if one’s prepared.
The conflagration exists only in my mind, but it’s viscerally painful. I’m blitzed with fear, watching the flames consume Totoro’s “fur,” watching his cute face blacken and disappear.
I progress no further in the visualization; it feels like enough. I don’t take the next logical step. I do not imagine anything bad happening to the person lying next to me in bed: my wife Ashley.
This isn’t a regular habit of mine, though I do often feel, especially at the end of the night, vaguely unready. Have I ever considered what I’d grab first if the house was on fire? What could I stand least to lose?
I’ve always worried I’m too sentimental. I definitely worry my sentimentality for the Guys is holding me back somehow. Is this childish? Naive? Overly romantic? I worry my affection for these fluffballs—my reliance on them—makes me irrational and deluded. Not real enough to handle real life. Is that why my psyche is apparently trying to destroy them?
I don’t judge myself this harshly for employing other modes of imagination. Society, too—the respectable part, at least—prizes certain flights of fancy. There is a band I’ve loved most of my life called Neutral Milk Hotel. They wrote an album dripping with sentimentality and invention and dread called In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, whose opening song, “The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One,” is nothing if not exaggeratedly tender. With this album, the band seized the hearts of an entire artistic generation forever. They likely would’ve catapulted to mainstream success, if their leader, Jeff Mangum, hadn’t vanished from the scene overnight.
Tenderness, in both senses, overflows in Mangum’s lyrics. Aeroplane’s songs are suffused with surreal, incendiary images—“pianos filled with flames, on empty rings around the sun”—like romps through infinite meadows of giant mutant ornamental grasses and carnivorous bird-mammal-worm hybrids. I suspect Mangum can’t help his sentimentality; this is how the muse comes to him. Nor can he tolerate repressing his knowledge of darkness. Rather than disavow one or the other, he gives us the whole of both: music with boundless originality, welling up and out from every direction, refusing to neglect beauty or shrink from terror.
I know stuffed animals aren’t sentient. If the choice was between saving the Guys from the fire, and saving myself, I’d let them burn. Totoro, yes, and Cooper, the one-eyed alligator, and Booky the rabbit, and Squiggles the frog, and Gorilla of my Dreams, who’s been Ashley’s since age four. Right? Wouldn’t I? I would miss them so much. I would feel like… like it’s harder to feel. It’s like they express something I can’t express in any other way. “How strange it is to be anything at all.”
When Ashley or I travel solo, Totoro tags along. We text a photo of him from the road: at a pizza shop; tucked into the hotel room covers; wedged into the passenger seat between a notebook and a box of Lorna Doones. He stands in for the absent other, keeping us in tune, as if he emits a frequency, vibrating across the physical distance, that only she and I can receive. The Guys represent us. Somehow they are us. Maybe they’re the parts of us too close to the source to show each other directly.
All people have an unbridgeable gap between them. Even two people in love. Being people, we try to bridge it anyway. Because people are lonely, and creative, and restless, and we just can’t help it.
I first heard Neutral Milk Hotel during sophomore year at Wash U in St. Louis, in 2003: the beginning of my Pitchfork era. Elementary school was Top 40, middle school was pop punk, high school was radio-friendly alternative, and freshman year was catching up on the classics (The Beatles, Led Zeppelin) and riding the wave of the garage rock revival (I preferred The White Stripes to The Strokes, but I hated “Fell in Love With a Girl”).
Pitchfork, the online magazine, leveraged the still-democratic digital media environment to become an ascendent tastemaker, laying out a map of quality independent, underground music in all its bewildering glory. Diving in, I felt exhilarated. The common thread connecting my favorite music to that point: it was a little safe. I was more than a little safe myself, cautious to a fault. I never volunteered first for anything. I’d never dated anyone, endlessly fantasizing instead about whoever was subject to my current infatuation. Plagued by wicked anxiety—tightness in my stomach, clenching of my jaw and neck, flushes of heat filling my chest—I intellectualized all other feelings. I was cheerful on the surface, in easy situations; underneath, I carried a heavy, wistful melancholy I had no idea how to express.
My first year away from home pried me open just enough. I made a few close friends, fellow obsessives who’d rather get high in the dorm on Friday nights—watching Family Guy, listening to Radiohead, playing chess in the hallway and Tony Hawk on the Dreamcast—than get hammered on boxed wine and Natty Light at the frats. After getting dumped by my prospective sophomore roommates—and crying for days—I lucked into a suite with an eclectic crew of well-liked guys from my floor who needed to fill an extra spot, who I felt basically took me on as a charity case.
Over the summer, back in Omaha, I diagnosed myself with social anxiety disorder, and started an SSRI. Returning to campus emboldened, I gradually broke through my fear of rejection, proactively engaging my suitemates, and anyone I met besides—with the exception of every girl I ever liked, of whom I stayed scared shitless as a rule.
What I’m telling you is, I was more than ready for 90s indie rock.
That fall, a new piece of software made the rounds: Direct Connect, which allowed anyone on the university’s network to offer up their MP3s to anyone else for their downloading pleasure. It was a perfect storm: newfound social confidence, sophisticated music nerds all around, Pitchfork’s “Top 100 Albums of the 1990s”—plus the rest of its seemingly bottomless well of news and reviews—and the ability to immediately check out almost any band I ran across.
I got smitten by three bands who each reached their apex in the mid- to late 90s. With Belle & Sebastian and Pavement, it was a natural marriage. Never could have gone any other way. Neutral Milk Hotel, far less so. I knew they were “weird.” I’d listened to a lot of stuff that was a little offbeat from what I’d heard before. I was getting used to it, and gaining assurance generally. I was by then a PBR-drinking, clove cigarette-smoking, used paperback-collecting, budding hipster. In 2003, Neutral Milk Hotel was still certifiably out-there. But their Pitchfork imprimatur deified them in my eyes, and it was good to have permission. (Aeroplane was rated an 8.7 at the time. Two years later they raised it to a 10.0.)
There’s no way I could have been prepared for In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It’s as singular as the day it dropped. Accordians, organs, singing saws, horns nobody’s ever heard of, multisyllabic instruments probably invented on the spot by Julian Koster to play five notes and never used again. Jeff Mangum’s vocal onslaught: stark, plaintive, stately, howling, straining, haunted. Lyrics with semen-stained mountaintops, ghosts, two-headed boys, Jesus Christ, and Anne Frank.
I don’t remember what I thought of “The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One” on the first listen. (The title is written various ways in various places. Here I’m copying Holly Brickley’s spelling from Deep Cuts, because that’s good company.) The actual memory has receded over the years. Only the reverberations remain. I know for sure my initial experience of Aeroplane was all of a piece; one song was inextricable from another, as if the entire album had sublimated into an undifferentiated diffusion of neuroactivity, the way pantheon-level musical encounters tend to feel when you’re 19 years old.
With more listens, I succumbed to the romance, these two kids finding each other, becoming each other’s worlds. Such a triumphant-sounding vision, with guitar and accordion and something called a zanzithophone. A vision of the precise thing which I, a never-been-kissed college boy, wanted more than anything else. I zeroed in on the intimate scenes of young love and sex and took the rest—the ill-fated relationship of the narrator’s parents, the inauspicious associations of the tumbling tower and the rattlesnakes—for colorful scene-setting, or as the kind of poetics—irreducible to any specific meaning—frequently found in a Jeff Mangum verse.
You can find all manner of interpretations and word-by-word parsings of the song online, in books, in documentaries, and probably in real time, in college dorms and parents’ basements to this day, though the ways in which kids discover music have changed irrevocably. I hope there are still misfits and sensitive rebels out there putting on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea for the first time, mesmerized and searching, hearing that acoustic guitar, hearing that klaxon of a voice sing “When you were young…”
The only thing I can find Mangum ever saying publicly about “The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One” is that it’s a true story.
It’s not as though I didn’t register the lines about drinking and fork-stabbing and dreaming of death. They didn’t resonate. Life was pretty restrained. My parents weren’t alcoholics; they weren’t violent. They didn’t let me watch PG-13 movies until I was literally 13. I can count on one hand the number of times I did my own laundry at home; when I went off to school, my parents paid a service to do it for me. I played by myself in my room for hours and hours and hours, not because I needed to hide, but because I could take calmness for granted.
You can’t fully relate to a song about loss of innocence when you haven’t yet lost it yourself.
Totoro, of course, comes from the 1988 Hayao Miyazaki film My Neighbor Totoro. He’s a forest spirit, an inscrutable protector, albeit a mildly threatening-looking one at first appearance. He appears to a pair of sisters, Satsuki and Mei, as they settle into a new house in the woods with their father. The girls are missing their mom, who’s in the hospital nearby, recovering from a serious ailment. They’re in limbo, on an invisible bridge between the world of children and a strange, formless, grown-up world of ambiguity and disquiet.
It’s a world of loss; it’s also a world where everything is spiritually alive. Totoro is sturdy, making measured, decisive movements. A benevolent, eerie presence, who affirms: there is more out here than what you have seen. It’s scary. But it’s OK, because you won’t be stranded, and you won’t be alone. When the girls’ mother postpones her visit home due to a setback with her illness, four-year-old Mei gets lost trying to reach her. It’s Totoro who answers Satsuki’s plea for help and hurries to the rescue. The film is restive but warm, and unbearably cute. You can’t help but love Totoro. You can’t help but believe.
Ashley introduced me to My Neighbor Totoro pretty soon after we met, in 2008, in Omaha. She was a 20-year-old Creighton pharmacy student from Minneapolis, and I was 24, going back to grad school for computer science. We bonded over the cuteness of Totoro. We bonded over cute things of all kinds: birds, Animal Crossing, stickers, pareidolia, Seth Rogen movies. We developed a cutesy way of speaking to each other, used only in private. We had cutesy nicknames for each other. We both grew up with pet bunnies, so Ashley and I would rub each other’s heads and shoulders and thighs using our chins, the way rabbits claim their territory. I bought her a stuffed rabbit she named Booky after Booker Woodfox, the star of the Creighton basketball team.
It was my first relationship of any kind. Ashley’s first since high school. My boundaries were non-existent; I wanted to hang out at her place on campus all the time. When she’d kick me out, because she needed to study, I’d put up a fight, always lose it, then slink back to my room in some guy’s basement I found on Craigslist. Early on, I tried to tease Ashley the way my guy friends teased me, by mock insulting her, but instead of firing back, or blowing me off, her face would fall into a frown, she’d go quiet, and I quickly stopped saying anything critical at all.
I was so desperate for intimacy for so long, I spent so much time imagining it and so little time living it, that when it finally arrived, my body couldn’t handle it. The first time we tried to have sex, I got so anxious I had to run to the bathroom to throw up. I’d learned to tolerate those exhausting sensations, like they were unpleasant housemates who always paid the bills on time: the tightness in my stomach, the clenching of my jaw and neck, the flush of heat filling my chest. Would they ever end? I was so enamored with Ashley. We’d already shared so much. How could I be so afraid
We were patient with each other. Ashley didn’t shame me for my physical inhibitions. She encouraged me, allowing us to go at my pace. When I started getting too handsy in public, Ashley had no trouble instructing me to cut it out.
We enjoyed each other, needed each other, needed to enjoy and share all the cuteness and whimsy we saw all around us, and found within ourselves. We built our tower tumbling through the trees.
We moved in together. We got married.
We were pretty much happy.
One morning, lying in bed together, Ashley reached for Totoro, in his customary spot between our pillows. I watched him wobble toward me, climb onto my stomach, and peer into my face.
“... Maars?”
This was one of her nicknames for me, an evolution of “my Aaron.”
Totoro spoke to me in a pregnant version of Ashley’s voice, hesitant and weighty, but gentle. I wish I could remember the rest of what he (she) said. I see the setting clearly. But the audio track cuts out; I can intuit her tone, but the words are somehow missing. Whatever it was, Ashley’d been sitting on it. She couldn’t find any other way to broach it with me, except through Totoro.
It was in our condo in Chicago, which makes it 2019 at the earliest: after the five years Ashley worked overnights as a retail pharmacist in Omaha and Council Bluffs, Iowa; after she landed a one-year residency at the specialty Walgreens in Northwestern Hospital; after she leased, sight unseen, a tiny, drab Ravenswood apartment with a rent payment higher than the mortgage on our three-bed, two-bath house in Omaha; after I spent the year traveling back and forth while Ashley worked 60-hour weeks; after Walgreens made her a manager at a different Chicago specialty site before she even finished her program; after I packed up and sold the Omaha house on my own; after Ashley’s dad died of a heart attack; after we drove to Minnesota and spent two weeks sorting through the mess he left; after we spent another two years in probate for his estate.
Was it during the pandemic, when she had to keep going to the pharmacy, logging extra hours to boot, while I and everyone else in our friend group worked safely from home? Was it about her feelings of isolation after she finally took a corporate work-from-home job? Was it about finding a new couples therapist?
It could have just as easily been any of the other hundreds of concerns married people stumble into, the kind of concern that winds up on the cutting room floor of life’s highlight reel, the kind that usually turns out to be not much of anything, unless it’s the kind that comes roaring back at you years later out of the blue.
The harder I try to remember, the further it seems to slip away.
Kafka said a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. Far be it from me to modify Kafka. Can I just add one little thing? For me, music does the same, and in a much shorter time.
Music is easy access now. It’s wonderful to partake in the full majesty of a century-plus of human sonic ingenuity, all from a search bar in an app on my phone. (Less wonderful for the artists making thousandths of a penny per stream.) The same phenomenon, however, sets music up to get taken for granted, to fade increasingly into life’s background. I’ve listened to hundreds of songs while writing this; many of them came and went with zero conscious awareness on my part. Even great songs, songs I love. It’s partly what I’m aiming for, using music as a creative aid, but still. Very few songs will jerk me into the present moment every time without fail.
“The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One” is one of them. It’s not like the sounds it makes when it comes on are all that discordant with whatever was on previously, especially when compared with the rest of the wild stuff on Aeroplane. It’s really as simple as an opening could be. Strumming the acoustic guitar. Exceedingly standard; frequently boring. In this case it’s distinctive enough to be unmistakable.
I’m not a musician, let alone a guitar guy, so here’s what I can tell you. For a man who loves his noisescapes and his lo-fi recordings, Jeff Mangum (and producer Robert Schneider; never shortchange him!) figured out how to produce the cleanest, clearest acoustic guitar sound I’ve ever heard.
As soon as I hear that riff, it becomes the one thing in the world. It sounds like it must be in perfect tune. It sounds like four guitars playing at once. It is loud and ringing and revelatory, like a church bell. Like a religious vision.
It creates a threshold. It’s purifying, wiping away almost everything which came before. Like a fire. Like a death.
The Totoro, as styled by Ashley; July 2018
Ashley died by suicide on November 11, 2023. She was 35 years old.
What happens after your partner dies is, you can’t escape them. They’re everywhere you look; everything reminds you of them.
The one thing you want most is to have them back. Failing that, the second thing you want most is to have a moment, one moment, of not having to think about them.
Your brain begins a process of shutting out all your memories of them. All of them, with equal and extreme prejudice: good and bad, happy and sad, extraordinary and mundane. This happens automatically. It’s not ideal, but it’s fine. It needs to happen so you can survive the first weeks, the first months.
And then… and then. Your brain incrementally accustoms itself to reality: they are gone. Not coming back. That’s when—at some point—you don't even notice—their spirit starts to fade away.
When I realized her spirit was fading away, I started looking for her everywhere.
I found her in music. Any song, every song, was about her, or about me and her, or about me without her, until proven otherwise. When a song did not prove itself otherwise, I added it to a Spotify playlist. I didn’t listen to the playlist all the time, or even very often. I couldn’t allow those songs to become background. In my tryingest times, when I needed them the most, they were there.
Something compelled me to listen to “The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One.” I don’t remember what it was; or maybe I heard it randomly. It was September 2, 2024. Spotify knows all; that’s the date I added it to my playlist. I’m pretty sure I added it before the song was even over. I bet you I added it as soon as I heard that acoustic guitar.
It’s incredible, the lives a song can have. I’ve known “The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One” for over 20 years. (Truth is, I went most of those years hardly listening to Neutral Milk Hotel at all.) According to my last.fm charts, I listened to it 37 times before Ashley died. The real number is probably dozens higher; the data only goes back to 2005. It certainly doesn’t include the night in 20-year-old Ashley’s dorm suite, when three of her high school friends drove down from Minneapolis and two of us stayed up super late listening to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea on the living room floor, drunkenly singing along, hitting like 3% of the notes.
Through all that time, I never perceived the song to be about us. And now it is. Ashley’s that “you.” My King of Carrot Flowers. She’s also the dad…
It’s pretty devastating—and cute, too, I think. Ashley was never a huge Neutral Milk Hotel fan. But she did appreciate black humor, and she’d get a kick out of it.
I know people who don’t care for earnest music. Neutral Milk Hotel is maybe not for them. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is fun, it’s whimsical, it’s bizarre, and it’s about as earnest as they come.
I said the guitar in “The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One” was like a religious vision. I could characterize my reaction to it as a form of ecstasy, a word we once used to describe someone in a trance, a person “beside oneself.” Ecstasy is “an extraordinary elevation of the spirit, as when the soul, unconscious of sensible objects, is supposed to contemplate heavenly mysteries.” (Webster’s Dictionary, 1913.)
This sense lives on in filmmaker Werner Herzog’s notion of ecstatic truth, in which certain not-quite-reality-based artistic techniques produce a great amount of explanatory power and meaning, surpassing anything gained through a narrower dependence on the easily quantifiable. For him, facts are “a superficial truth, the truth of accountants.” Other things feel truer than true. They get at something underneath or beyond our experience, something we can’t comprehensively describe with any language we have available. Ecstatic truth is “mysterious and elusive, and can only be reached through fabrication, imagination, and stylization.”
In his book Endless Endless, a history of the Elephant 6 recording collective which spawned Neutral Milk Hotel, Adam Clair attributes part of the Aeroplane’s ongoing adoration to the fact that nobody can explain why they love it so much. Instead they insist everyone else listen to it for themselves.
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is like a religious vision in a second way. Clair suggests one reason the album inspires such deep devotion is its “negative space, created by impossibly abstract lyrics, unfamiliar instrumentation, and other bits of psychedelic mystique.”
“The vast negative space creates a blankness onto which the listener projects their deepest anxieties and scars,” Clair writes. “The album becomes an anthem for the damaged, agnostic toward the particulars of a given listener’s trauma… No matter the intensity of your troubles, Aeroplane can refract them through its many facets into something jarring, comforting, terrifying, and enlightening.”
Not to be too precious about it, but, ahem, doesn’t that kinda sound like god? What is religious belief, if not a response to negative space?
“The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One” feels truer than true. “Let go,” it says, “of what you think you know, and put your faith in what you don’t.” So I listen. Some kind of portal opens up within me, and I enter. From above me, how I sink into my soul.
I used to be tremendously ashamed to let on about the existence of the Guys. They seemed like a hazard on my quest for maturity. If I told anyone our stuffed animals talked to us, had personalities, helped us make it through the tough times, those people would see me for who I feared I might secretly be: a scared little boy.
I know now it’s OK to be scared; it's being afraid of fear that causes me trouble. I know it’s important to share what scares me. To put my faith in what I don’t yet know. That was the whole key all along. Maturity? It’s the courage to release the fearful boy from his prison, and let him finally breathe some air.
After In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Jeff Mangum killed his own career.
Frazzled by a demanding year of touring and interviewing to support the record, Mangum started passing up opportunities to play shows, even low-stress local gigs for friendly audiences. Where once he'd been an enthusiastic core member of the Elephant 6 collective, he became scarce. Slowly those around him accustomed themselves to reality: nothing more was going to happen with Neutral Milk Hotel.
From the fans’ perspective, it was much more abrupt. As Adam Clair writes, “There wasn’t a press release announcing a breakup… He just went silent. Where once stood a shambolic indie rock quartet, there was now only space.”
What shocked me most was learning Jeff couldn’t find a way to tell his friends, his bandmates. Maybe he couldn’t articulate why he had to stop, and it scared him. He definitely didn't want to break their hearts. But he understood in his mind what he needed to do.
I find myself wishing Mangum had a Totoro to speak for him. Maybe he did. Maybe there are some things even a Totoro can’t say.
In his book, Clair extends the idea of negative space to Jeff Mangum’s absence from public life. Its very fact forces those of us who miss him to create our own meaning.
“The one thing more difficult for the human mind to conceptualize than infinity is a pure void. No sound deafens like silence. Our imaginations rush to occupy the empty spaces.”
With Ashley, I believed in the Guys—mostly.
I wish I could ask her what she thought. I can’t recall us ever talking explicitly about what the Guys were. It felt delicate, because I had my doubts.
And then, when she died, the Guys went silent.
That’s how I knew they were real.
Some sadnesses are so large, they threaten to overwhelm the psychic system. Evolutionarily speaking, we need a way to deal with that; otherwise we’d become totally incapacitated. We need to contain them in order to keep functioning, but we don’t want to feel contained.
What we need is an infinitely expanding container, into which we can pour more and more and more and more significance and ecstasy and hurt.
A container you can keep in that secret place where no one dares to go.
A container that isn’t really real. So it can’t ever burn down.
Conjuring that container is the gift of music, the gift of art, the gift of imagination.
“The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One” is expansive, it is resonant, it is teleportational. Such a numinous, exalted realm it provides—a two-minute escape to the reality beyond everyday life—and such inspiration it provides to return to life fortified and renewed. It’s contained everything I’ve needed it to contain. And I’m just one guy.
For a long time, it’s been there.
From “the room one afternoon” I knew I could love her. And every day since.
One morning, lying in bed alone, I reached for Totoro, in his customary spot between my pillows. I watched him wobble toward me, climb onto my stomach, and peer into my face.
He chinned me, just like Ashley and I used to do. He bounced on my chest, clowning, tossing his blobby head this way and that. He hopped back down onto the sheets.
He edged over to her side of the bed.
He gazed at the empty space there.
He bowed three times, and kissed the pillow.
He returned to me, and gave me a hug.
He loves me, I thought.
Who loves me? This stuffed animal? Ashley? Myself? God?
Does it matter?
Aaron Wolfson is a writer and an editor. You can find his work in the Chicago Review of Books, and in his email newsletter. You can find his Green Day fan site in the Television City neighborhood of GeoCities in the year 1997. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, with a number of wild and crazy Guys.