Song of the Week: 6/9-6/15/25

Youth Lagoon: "Montana"

The video for Youth Lagoon’s “Montana” is a masterpiece that explores how a son is haunted by the ghost of his father, who never returned from home from war. There are ghosts that live with us our entire lives and we all come to term with these ghosts differently. I remember watching this video for the first time right after I had seen Terrance Malick’s masterpiece The Tree of Life, which also explored a the ghost of a father upon the lives of his sons.

I remember reading Roger Ebert’s review of The Tree of Life and his allusion to Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine and feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude of the art set before my eyes and how it was multiplied, compounded, and punctuated by emotions that I could not describe. At one point of the review Ebert writes,

The parents are named Mr. O’Brien and Mrs. O’Brien. Yes. Because the parents of other kids were never thought of by their first names, and the first names of your own parents were words used only by others. Your parents were Mother and Father, and they defined your reality, and you were open to their emotions, both calming and alarming. And young Jack O’Brien is growing, and someday will become Mr. O’Brien, but will never seem to himself as real as his father did.

In his book Buster’s Book: Family Voices to and From the Front, WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, Donald Junkins writes about his father, Ralph Chester Junkins, and his brother, Roland (Buster), and the war. Interviewing Buster, Junkins records,

Many of the guys were thirty-nine, but a lot of us were only eighteen. There was never any penalty, I can say that, for those who just couldn’t do the forced marches and would fall by the side of the road, but I pride myself now. I don’t give myself the credit, of never falling out of anything. What kept me going was my father [he is very emotional here with great pauses]. When I felt like falling out, when I thought I was taking my last step, I could hear my father say, “Keep at ‘em, boy, keep at ‘em,” and that gave me the encouragement to keep going. I never dropped out of anything.

And when Buster made it home from the war, Junkins recounts,

Five years later, in 1946, I remember Buster coming through the kitchen door with his duffel bag on his shoulder, home from the occupation in Zellam See, Austria, after WW II, and my brother-in-law, Howie Leck behind him after picking him up at the train station in Lynn. We had waited for days after Buster sent a telegram that his was on the way from Austria to Camp Devens to get discharged, and when Buster called on the phone he had asked that Howie, who had married Better before Buster was drafted and was living with us at 82 Cleveland, come and pick him up in Central Square in Lynn (because he knew that it would be an emotional moment for all of us and he wanted to be home and in the house when it happened). He fell into my father’s arms and everybody was crying, including my father who I had never seen cry before, and my brother jokingly managed to say, “You’re not supposed to cry.”

Writing about his father Junkins remembers,

My father was a good man. [He was quiet, complicated, funny on occasion, devoted to his mother who was widowed when still a young woman, patriotic, retrained but forthright, and modest]. At the Fullerton Funeral Home in Saugus Center in 1960, when the working men from Building 6d, the Turbine Division of the General Electric Company, filed by his casket to pay their respects, more than one patted his face. When Dad re-told, at my insistent request, the Beany Craig story from his youth on Pine Hill (a true tale about his harelipped friend being continually misunderstood in the local grocery store and his exasperated reply, one that would be considered more than questionable in today’s world), he filled the room with laughter. During Sunday night service at the Dorr memorial Methodist Church in Lynnhurst, where he and I stood side by side and sang “This Is My Father’s Wold” during the Hymn Sing portion of the service conducted by either Andy Boynton or Mr. McClernon, I felt something closer than the essence of his voice and his presence. It was truly my own father’s world and I felt so lucky to be in it and with him.

“Montana”

You wore a hoodless sweatshirt on your bed that night
With black leggings, I've never seen your face so white
Your honesty was killing me
The monsters in the room were all dancing to the music all around us
A door is always open if it isn't closed
And a plant is said to be dead if it doesn't grow
I'll grow.. I will grow
There's a spirit in Montana and in your chest, a soul
Oh what a soul
I tried to be the middle-man between you and this list
I couldn't move as the footsteps neared closer to me from the monsters that feed
I swore that I wouldn't bleed.. I won't bleed
There's a spirit in Montana and in your chest, a note
That rings like the bells of cathedrals rung by the village scapegoat
As I walked slowly down your driveway to my car
I looked back and turned into salt
A pillar with a hat