This song is the carpeted waiting room of God’s lobby. Decorated like an upscale motor lodge, but still a lobby for God, and so of heaven. Trimmings of commerce linger on its edges—the smell of mall pretzels, makeup counter ladies spritzing perfume on passersby.  Volatile compounds of minted, cinnamon’d gum displays; the sterilized crinkle of prescription bags.  A black town car you’re traveling to the airport in—cold and dawn, but the heat’s on in its back seat, you watch the sun rise, you start counting the steps to the door of your heart. You are going up and down an escalator in many locations at once. So many of its phrases overhanging their lines’ meter, dragged over and under the bruleed guitar sounds like tide pulls. Hear it at night and it’s a prom dance, balloons slowly volleying off of dancers’ feet. Hear it in the day and it’s like cold medicine—a cottoned veil over your thoughts, now both wistful and automated. So diffuse; broadcast from underwater transmitters. Argonauts set sail to it. The refrain seems to be written on the walls, on the t-shirts of ghosts you walk among. Don’t let them win.

In the waiting room there are velvet plush pews that smell of Catholic incense and Little Pine car freshener, and you kneel on them for the organ segment, look up through a stained glass cupola in expectation of the crescendo. As you kneel, you commune with every loneliness you’ve ever known, each of them folded together and suddenly sweet, berries studding the strange candied cream of the song.