second round game
(8) Blink-182, “Adam’s Song”
retired
(16) Grandpaboy, “Lush and Green”
88-76
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.
The Depression Playlist: Emma Allmann on “Adam’s Song”
I never thought I’d die alone, although to be fair, my suicidal ideations never made it to a planning phase. The fantasy of a long peaceful rest was always disrupted by the mess I’d leave behind. My room was covered in clothes, dirty mugs, and hadn’t been vacuumed since I’d moved in. Someone would have to deal with that. The guilt would surely follow me into death. My ghost would be haunted. That was no way to rest. This was back when I didn’t cry. When I was in my twenties and doing everything, including depression, for the first time. There’s an angst I identify with the horror of self-determination and the soundtrack to that angst, the depression playlist, always includes “Adam’s Song” by Blink-182. Because yes, I was laughing the loudest and surely no one knew the truth of how I was feeling (people knew). I was a good time (my friend Elise asked me outright if I had depression). No one else had been through this before (I teach college Freshman now; they are all going through this). It was a confusing mix of unbridled, joyful freedom and an incapacitating weight of responsibility and potential consequences. It took me a long time to realize I was depressed because I mostly just felt frozen.
This still hits from time to time. I notice it most when I get invited to two or more events in one evening. About 65% of the time I choose to pour myself some cran-apple juice in a wineglass, put on my long black satin robe, and swan about my house shout-singing Hadestown, Meek, or my depression playlist, depending on what type of isolation I feel like having. Eventually I’ll collapse in front of my tv, turn on Bob’s Burgers or Midsomer Murders, and sooth my brain into silence with the familiar cadence of shows I know by heart. I don’t think this is bad. I firmly believe that one of the benefits of being 34 is that frequently when I say I don’t want to be social, I am correct about that and so I stay home.
In my twenties this freeze applied to my entire life, and I’d never really experienced saying no to anyone. For any reason. It was less FOMO and more compulsion. I wasn’t going with the flow, although I got a little thrill whenever people said that’s how they saw me, I was caught in a river at the bottom of a canyon. Climbing out felt pretty impossible.
I never conquered, rarely came and in reading the lyrics written down I realize this is a play on Vini Vidi Vici, I came, I saw, I conquered. But I respect Blink-182’s propensity for sexual inuendo too much to ignore this one. I’ve long had a fraught relationship with even the idea of dating. As a kid, after I took a class on how to be a babysitter, I got to watch our neighbor’s newborn. Mark and Alysha were not married and were pretty open about the fact that their baby was an accident. They fought all the time and loudly. We would hear them fight, look out the kitchen window and see Mark slam his front door shut, run to his truck, and skid out of their driveway. My mom would say, “You know it is ok to just be friends with someone. It’s good to make a lot of friends.”
And I did. I made so many friends. Friends who I loved dearly and suddenly started acting different around their boyfriend and treating me different because their boyfriend didn’t like me. I never got angry about it. I was confused, sad, and convinced that relationships would likely change a person for the worse. Sure I could date someone, but who would I have to give up? Who would I have to become? Why would I ever let someone else impact me in that way? In high school it always looked like my friends were giving more than they were getting, that’s sometimes still true in adulthood. Even in moments wherein I felt a bit of jealous, wherein I wondered if maybe I was missing out on some sort of connection or fun, I always reminded myself that goal number one was to get the hell out of that small town. The fantasy of my future big city life was enough to sustain me. If I could just leave, then maybe I could start to see myself in a relationship. I could conquer. I could come.
I never thought I’d die alone except for that brief period of time beginning in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic had me working from home full time with no options to go see people after work. Between this period of depression and my cute little breakdown in undergrad, I’ve discovered that I can track my own mental health based upon how messy my space is. I’ve begun to see it as Catholic guilt finally working for me. If I’m too messy to die, then I have to clean, and if I’ve got it in me to clean, I don’t want to die anymore. If I think about it for too long I start to feel like a Roomba who sometimes sits at the charging deck for an inappropriate amount of time.
The first two years of the pandemic is a rare black hole of time, space, and memories that nostalgia just can’t seem to tap into. The media I took in is the only thing that touches on sepia toned for me. I got pretty obsessed with the idea that I could turn Dua Lipa’s album Future Nostalgia into a jukebox musical about the pandemic. I got really high while watching Marriage or Mortgage and I still think fondly of losing my absolute mind about how long the camera lingered on a dog shitting in a yard that wasn’t even his. His owners were just touring the house. I remember adding Ashe’s “Moral of the Story” and “Save Myself” to my depression playlist, only to play them over and over on repeat. My upstairs neighbor stomped on my ceiling while I spun in a circle and sang them at the top of my lungs. He was trying to get me to shut up but he was on the beat, so I kept going. The pandemic black hole is also filled with media that belongs further back, but I pulled it through to the future with me. The Goo Goo Dolls, Shania Twain, Alanis Morrisette, 4 Non-Blondes, and, of course, Blink-182 all kept me company. It was a relief, I think, to put myself in the mindset of a college version of me who was so depressed she dropped out but then went back and graduated. Or a high school version of me who was flirting with depression and writing angry screeds about my mom in my journal only to turn the page and write, “If anyone reads this in the future, I want you to know I do not hate my mom. She is just so frustrating sometimes. But I don’t really hate her. For the record.”
I never conquered, rarely came, but then I’ve always been the sort of hippy that felt conquering was for insecure fools who are trying to compensate for some lack or other. Which is how I justified almost never having any confrontation at all. Much of my twenties was spent running away from where I was meant to be, or said I would be, or thought I should be. I committed to the bit for so long I ended up living out of my Chevy Traverse while traveling around the Pacific Northwest. You want to have a conversation with me? Too bad suckers I’m driving to an area that doesn’t even have cell service.
I spent some time in Glacier National Park and headed to Missoula Montana in theory to send off some articles I would get paid pennies for, but really because I was craving a burger. I had largely been sustaining myself on peanut butter and crackers. To this day eating those manically dry little sandwiches makes me feel like I should be in my car with the windows down. I didn’t just want a burger. I needed a burger. For the whole drive I was salivating at the thought of juicy meat patties with the sluttiest cheese you could imagine melted over the top, pickle slices with the subtlest crunch, and classic, low key, perfect buns. I had about $12 in my bank account and I was willing to spend it all. I’m a good Wisconsin girl so when I want a burger I look up nearby breweries.
Turns out, there are different laws about beer and food in different states. I didn’t realize until after I ordered my beer I would not be able to order food at this particular brewery. The bartender took pity on me and poured me some Chex Mix on a napkin. Those cruel dry pretzels could never woo me. I must have looked particularly sad because the bar tender and a regular sat with me and chatted while I tried both to drink my beer fast and not accidentally get very drunk. I got quite drunk. They told me of a food truck that has the best burgers in town and would be parked next to a coffee shop. Not quite walking distance but if I had a bike I could probably make it there. I thanked them for their time and hauled my bike out of the back of my Chevy.
When I arrived at the coffee shop the food truck was not open yet and I sat on the curb and genuinely fought off tears. Some girls who were leaving the coffee shop and waiting for a ride asked me if I was ok. I was not ok. So I just nodded my head silently to keep them a polite distance away from my inevitable nutrient deprived, slightly tipsy, breakdown.
They sat down next to me and assured me that the food truck would be open in 20 minutes. They also told me I had arrived at the perfect time because that evening the town of Missoula was going to be doing their First Friday Art Walk, and on Saturday I could go experience any of their three farmers markets. We got to chatting for so long I fully missed the opening of the food truck. After they left I stood in line and felt better than I had since before Glacier National Park. Not full. I needed that burger. She was sexy. She was perfect, but when she was gone, I was alone again.
I never conquered, rarely came, and honestly that’s fine. I don’t think I’d be as good at getting what I want if I hadn’t run away for a little while. These days while grading, reading, doomscrolling, whenever I’m sitting on my couch, whenever I’m doing what needs to be done or I want to do, I will surprise myself by bursting into to tears. I will be laden with a sadness that I can sometimes pinpoint to loneliness, frustration, or overwhelm. Sometimes I sort of gesture wildly at the world and assume that it’s all seeping into me, worrying and itching at my sadness. Frequently it’s within three days before my period starts, but not exclusively. Sometimes it’s because someone on a Hulu commercial cared deeply about their dog. Whatever it is, the trigger can’t begin to describe the ocean of tears that I fear will spill if I let them, if I don’t stop it up. My face scrunches and I pretend someone else is in the room. I lean my back to reverse the tears.
“Sorry” I say to no one. “Fuck.”
It’s habit to try and stop crying, maybe not healthy but on the scale of unhealthy habits I’m actually ok with that. I used to not cry at all. In my frozen twenties I sat in my disgusting room numb and angsty watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer hoping for sad scenes that pulled the tears out of me. In the early pandemic I listened to Adam’s Song and thought about all the people who wronged poor little high school me. I was aching to feel more human, more normal. Now I cry a little bit, stop myself, and then feel a little silly for stopping myself. So I tell my friends about it.
It was a relief to talk to my friend Liv, who is also in their thirties, and realize that we both have had the same experience. Maybe it’s how hormones work in our thirties, maybe it’s how feelings work in 2026. We take in so much of the world, we do what we can and know for a fact that it’s probably not enough, but it is something and that’s not nothing. We rest, we cry, we repeat. If you don’t make time to cry, it seems the tears will find you.
When I listen to the depression playlist and think about Adam’s Song, I think about loneliness. I think about not understanding my friends in high school, about not knowing the difference between friends, acquaintances, and random people on the street in undergrad, about the bartender and girls in Missoula, and about the clinking pipes in my basement apartment in Chicago. It’s sort of annoying that every story I tell is just about someone, often me, who was alone and then it turns out I need people, actually. I need people a lot. They make me feel more human. They make me feel full. They make me feel so much that it’s exhausting, and it gets to the point where I can’t wait till I get home to pass the time in my room alone.
Emma Allmann studied creative writing UW-Madison and is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa. She has had pieces published with Ellipsis, Ink In Thirds, and EcoTheo Review, shortlisted with Smokelong, and has had a play produced for the Marcia Légère Student Play Festival at UW-Madison.
barry montgomery on “Lush and Green” by Grandpaboy
“Lush and Green" is a melancholy meditation on death, grief, and communion with nature. It’s a likely contender for the most obscure competitor in the March Sadness 2026 playoffs, and the odds of it doing well here are correspondingly low, but that somehow seems appropriate, because nearly everything about this song feels a bit unlikely.
It was quietly slipped out into the world in 1997 on Grandpaboy, a five-song EP named after the artist who made it. The other four songs on this release were raucous, loosely tossed-off rock’n’roll fun (if you’re so inclined, anyway), but “Lush in Green” is cut from very different cloth. In this context, the song serves as a sobering walk in the fresh air, a quick break from an otherwise frenzied party thrown in the mobile home of a fading senior citizen trapped in the body of a juvenile delinquent, or vice versa. (“Grandpa needs a nap/Boy, he gets a slap,” goes a line in the opening cut, which revolves around a lusty appreciation of female bellybuttons.) But the polar-opposite tone of “Lush and Green” suggests that perhaps this eccentric, indeterminately aged character contains multitudes.
Behind the Grandpaboy mask lay an artist who split the difference between silver fox and precocious adolescent. For this was, in reality, The Artist Previously Known as Paul Westerberg, taking a small vacation from his more “professional” solo career. From the 90s onward Westerberg was, somewhat to his chagrin, The Artist Primarily Known as the Former Leader of the Replacements,* a band whose lifespan ran almost exactly the length of the 1980s. Not that he was ashamed of the work he did with his old band, but as a solo artist, he very much wanted to move out of their shadow, and that prospect was looking less and less likely the longer the 90s dragged on. Westerberg was, at the time he unleashed Grandpaboy on a mostly indifferent public, a musician in his late thirties who’d been touring and releasing albums consisting almost entirely of his own self-penned songs for almost two decades.
“Lush and Green” begins with a very low organ drone and then a few seconds of strummed acoustic guitar before Westerberg’s vocals kick in. His opening lines are striking both for their words and the dusky, world-weary tone in which they are delivered:
I kissed the wind and made the rain
Jealous enough to fall for days
Nice work if you can get it! It sounds like our narrator is a real nature (grandpa)boy, wooing the wind so passionately that it coaxes rain from jealous, jilted clouds. Is this a story of elemental spirits competing for romantic favors, like something out of ancient mythology? The next two lines change things up a bit, seemingly casting the narrator as the rain itself, rather than its rival:
I fall on you when I hear thunder
I kiss the ground you lie under
If there was any doubt before, it’s now clear that we’re in the land of metaphors, and shifting ones at that. The meat of the matter, however, is that the narrator is mourning the loss of a loved one. He finds himself in such a fragile psychic state that the mere rumble of distant thunder is enough to send him into a new spiral of despair. He imagines himself as a spring shower falling on the cemetery grounds where a close female friend has been buried.**
With this turn, the song enters the realm of an easily recognizable trope: a man weeps over the grave of a loved one, and sees his grief echoed in the natural world around him. To borrow the title of an iconic blues song, the sky is crying. The literary term for this practice of projecting one’s feelings onto nature is the pathetic fallacy, but when that term was coined almost two centuries ago, “pathetic” wasn’t being used in its modern, derogatory sense. It is instead related the word’s Greek root, indicating the ability to feel.
Regardless of whether or not nature possesses any feelings, anthropomorphic or otherwise, it is the deep human feeling in Westerberg’s performance that really puts “Lush and Green” across, because it is otherwise minimalist in every way. As a recording, it features just a vocal, a fairly simple acoustic guitar part, and a barely perceptible organ drone. And as a song, it offers an absolute minimum of melodic variation, nary a chorus nor bridge in sight, and a short lyric that’s poetic but almost cryptically devoid of narrative detail. Despite all this bareness, the way Westerberg’s singing rides the alternately rising and falling melody line conjures such intense yearning and sorrow that I have found myself spellbound by this spare song for almost three decades.
The third couplet adds new angles to the narrator’s despair:
Now I only sleep when spoken to
So I’ll lay here still in morning dew
That first line casually twists a stock phrase about the behavior of passive, introverted people into something surreal and disorienting; it would be hard to take literally, but it certainly suggests that the narrator doesn’t hear anything anyone is saying to him, at least not in his current period of intense grief. It also implies that he isn’t getting any sleep, and that perhaps the closest he comes to it is when the chattering voices of other people lull him into a calm place by drowning out his own obsessive, anxious thoughts. The second line of this couplet finds him lying on the ground above his friend’s grave, getting as close to her as is now physically possible, perhaps in an attempt to feel her presence. If he could only hear her voice, it might let him to catch some actual sleep, maybe even dream a little dream. That doesn’t happen, of course, but at least he finds peace enough while lying on her grave to achieve stillness. The moisture of the morning dew he lies in serves as yet another way that nature manages to match his grief tear for tear.
Another crucial factor contributing to the sense of tragedy built into “Lush and Green” is the melodic motif that repeats throughout. The song is constructed from a series of six couplets, all sung to the same melody. The first line of each couplet slowly rises in pitch and builds in intensity, climaxing in its final few syllables. The second line is almost identical to the first in its first two thirds, charting the same methodically rising path, but it diverges in its final few syllables, with the pitch falling and momentum dissipating. This fall manages to relieve the tension of the rising first line and bring things to a sort of resting point, although the tenor of these brief, tenuous landings suggest resignation rather than any true sense of resolution or progress.
As this slow-motion rising and falling scheme plays out half a dozen times over the course of the song, with no variation or relief, it seems to sketch out the rhythm of a life lived at a slow, sober pace, head down, deliberately sticking to set routines; perhaps this life has also been touched by depression.*** The relentless repetition of this long, slow climbing and falling pattern suggests someone plodding through each day, downcast but not defeated, periodically working up the energy to try to pull themselves out of the rut they’ve toiled in for too long, but inevitably losing momentum and sinking down into the feeling that if there’s any change to be made, it can wait. Rinse and repeat: Tomorrow brings another day to work on transformation, and another day for it to all fall apart again. (Westerberg lyric from 13 years prior: “One more night to get it half-right / One more time to get it all wrong.”) It’s almost as if this melodic structure were designed to evoke the myth of Sisyphus and his stone. Up and down that damn hill, up and down. One more time. Take it from the top.
The last three lines of the song finally manage to inject a glimmer of hope into all this gloom. Here it feels like the winter of our narrator’s discontent has finally blossomed into a literal spring:
And I’ll drink up with these flowers and trees
I still love you, all is lush and green
Above you all is lush and green
The narrator’s grief may even have helped bring about this newfound beauty. The multiple days of rainfall described earlier, strongly linked to the narrator’s own tears of mourning, have worked their magic, drawing vibrant life from the cemetery grounds. The narrator understandably treats this natural bounty as good news to convey to his friend buried just below, but based on his delivery, it doesn’t sound like he himself takes nearly as much solace in this lushness as he would like to. It almost sounds as if he’s trying to convince himself that something positive has finally come from all this . . . because otherwise, how can he go on?
I’ve read that Westerberg once introduced this song in concert as “a song about dying in a season for living.” This is nicely ambiguous, since the death of the narrator’s friend has already happened well before the song has even begun. So if there’s any “dying” going on in the song’s present tense, it’s happening in the narrator’s heart, a shutting down of feeling as means of coping (hopefully not permanently). Perhaps the psychic wound of his friend’s death is still too fresh for him to enjoy his place in the song’s payoff, the lush and green world of the living. Maybe the signs of life blooming all around him as he continues to mourn his friend make her absence, along with the barrenness of his own inner landscape, all the more painful. April is the cruelest month, after all.
* I twice borrowed Prince's well-known Artist-Formerly-Known-As syntax above because, like the Purple One, Westerberg is not just a Minneapolis native, but one who settled in that city for life, rather than relocating to a coastal metropolis, like so many artists from middle America do after achieving success. Westerberg also knew Prince a bit, as a matter of playing at some of the same Minneapolis clubs early on in both of their careers. Later, both with the Replacements as a solo artist, Westerberg hired out the studio in Prince’s home compound, Paisley Park, for recording sessions. “[Prince] became comfortable enough to grace us with his presence, not bejeweled and not dressed up,” Westerberg remembered in the wake of Prince’s passing. “He’d be wearing maybe his jammies and sweatpants or maybe a pair of jeans and sneakers. He may have been a little more normal than he would’ve liked people to know. That’s the treasure that we got, to be able to sit in the big atrium where you’re taking a break and Prince shuffles by in his slippers and makes some popcorn in the microwave.”
** The original recording of the song I am discussing here never gives us any information about the person who has died—not even such basics as their gender or what their relation to the narrator was—friend, lover, or relative. For me, this gives the song more universality, and I’d love to leave it this ambiguous in my discussion, but I tried that and having to use the word “loved one” over and over again for the deceased became unworkably cumbersome. So I have reluctantly acted on information beyond what is contained in the original recording of the song. Some five years after the song’s release Westerberg began performing “Lush and Green” at some of his concerts, and he included an added bridge with lyrics that changed notably from one performance to another. He also spoke about his inspiration for the song in an interview around this time. Thanks to both of these things, especially the interview, it’s clear that the subject of the song was a female friend who died young and unexpectedly. I don’t consider the bridge added in live version to be a definitive part of the song, since there are at least three significantly different versions of it, and quite possibly more, so I’m leaving it out of this essay.
*** My hearing of this is unavoidably influenced by my knowledge of Westerberg’s life. The Replacements were notorious for their extreme alcohol intake, including in the hours before and during their live shows, but Westerberg got sober before the band’s final tour, and stayed that way for at least the next decade. He was also quite candid in many interviews about the fact that he was prone to periods of deep depression. (Another song on the Grandpaboy EP is called “Psychopharmacology,” a rave-up that explores his then-brand-new foray into psychiatric medication.)
Barry Montgomery rambled out of the mild Midwest on a meandering path that has included a bewildering variety of jobs, from scraping dried adhesive goo off the side of enormous metal tanks to editing the words of archangels and extraterrestrial overlords as channeled through human conduits. (He’s not making any of this up, though he suspects some of those human conduits probably were.) He won several regional Captain Beefheart lookalike contests, but was never able to translate that into success at the tri-state level. His favorite color is purple, despite what some of his so-called best friends will say on this subject.