A Song to Save Your Spirit
Elton John joined Yard Act in the studio to record the kind of music that makes this world inhabitable
EVERYTHING HAS ALREADY happened and time is an illusion. Mickey 17 releases in theaters. The President of the United States threatens Canada with annexation. Screams of Palestinians fall like tears onto soil soaked in children’s blood. Our time is a grim one. We stumble in the dark, yearning for a world we barely remember, recognizing only the corruption that slowly, then quickly, corrodes everything around us. We deny the beauty we cannot see.
The opening sentence of this piece is a lyric from “100% Endurance” by British post-punk band Yard Act1. There are two versions of “100% Endurance.” The first features on 2022 debut LP The Overload. The second, recorded for Record Store Day 2023, features Elton John. And one of them will, if you let it, carry your soul to Heaven.
I FIRST HEARD “100% Endurance” while blazed on my exceptionally uncomfortable couch. I was woken by a bang, announces lyricist James Smith. Enveloped within the purple haze of Pink Island Kush, I too would be woken by a bang in the form of this brilliant fucking song.
I heard the original version first, served to me on YouTube between videos I no longer remember. What I remember is seeing actor David Thewlis (who once played in a punk band called Door 66) awaking on a public bench as if from a three-day bender as Smith narrates the scene. Quickly he recalls a pivotal moment of the night before played on a loop by the news as a reverb-soaked keyboard shimmers above chewy, grooving bass.
Basically, thеy’d discovered that therе were others just like us
Other beings, other creatures, other planets and other species
Who had other gods that they believed in
And they interviewed all of them and every one of them
Not one could give any hint of a clue what they were doing here either
Reader, I was hooked. My brain swam with visions of bewildered aliens trapped in the United Kingdom. I haven’t a fucking clue what I’m doing here either, I agreed, as the chorus swept in, evoking an entire lineage of British guitar music.
It’s all so pointless, it is,
And that’s beautiful, I find it humbling, sincerely,
And when you’re gone, it brings me peace of mind to know that
This will all just carry on with someone else (someone else)
With something new (something new), no need to be blue
By this point our protagonist has gathered a following while striding majestically around the council estate he awoke in, voicing proclamations. He vibrates with life. His enthusiasm is infectious. I am aware of myself, moments before engulfed by this couch mourning a lightless world, now chuckling as David Thewlis, in a council estate in an England drained of color, dances unfazed.
I have been a fool, I realize. Yes, our planet will soon be uninhabitable, yes, we have surrendered the water and the air and our liberty and our lives and those of the unborn to faceless corporations, but what the fuck is moping going to do about it? You could be dancing on the street to a song only you hear. You could be savoring what time you have left with the people you love. In essence, Reader, I realized, if we’re all going to hell, what if we refuse to suffer one more minute we don’t have to until we get there?
IN 2015, FOLLOWING a romance the death of which smothered something inside me forever, I fled my pain along the east coast of Australia until, penniless, I returned to Ireland a year later older and skinnier and browner and no less sliced up than before I left. It was, of all places, in Zen Buddhism where I learned to cultivate a sense of peace.
Radical acceptance saved my life, or at least it saved my spirit. Because it was only when I understood, not just intellectually but spiritually—cosmically—the truth—that there is no self and therefore no death, that all moments occur simultaneously forever, that our resistance to reality paralyzes us inside of it—that I became able to see my suffering as an attachment to my ego, a figment of a construct. Made up. It’s all so pointless, I had been despairing, when all along the path to peace lay inside that very same revelation.
DEATH IS COMING for us all but not today, Smith declares in the interlude with only that warm, dreamy keyboard,
Today you’re living it, hey, you’re really feeling it
Give it everything you’ve got knowing that you can’t take it with you
And all you ever needed to exist has always been within you
The return of the full band is preceded by the arpeggio pluck of what sounds like a harp. Its placement in this song can only be called divine. An electric guitar washed in reverb leads to the final, most spiritual rendition of the chorus. The song is at its busiest now, its most ecstatic. I sit perched on the edge of the couch. It is more than a song. It is a calling. It is a prayer. I will be kinder to myself. I will be less antisocial. I will wake with gratitude. I will never again forget to remember how good this feels.
NINE HUNDRED WORDS ago, I told you there are two versions of “100% Endurance” and one eclipses the other. If you figured it’s the Elton John version, well done. Of course it is. The Elton rendition is structurally similar, but if you listen deeply you’ll notice a few ingenious tweaks that lift the song to the level of brilliance.
The most obvious change is that Elton John contributes the backing vocals, which are, of course, glorious, as well as the keys, switching out the synthesizer for a grand piano beamed in from some eon past. Elton’s style matched to Smith’s earnest idiosyncratic lyrics creates an effect of timelessness. The shattering of the illusion.
The most ingenious change arrives near the end. Like the original, the song fades out… until cellos and violins swell like a wave, Elton’s fingers dancing on the keys as the piano-and-strings outro soars the song to its most blissful peak before beginning a gradual descent. We were flying so high it takes a full minute to carry us back down to the earth.
I don’t know who’s responsible for these changes, Yard Act or Elton John or producer Ali Chant. It doesn’t matter. The universe speaks and we listen.
I LISTEN TO “100% Endurance,” the Elton John version, on seven-inch vinyl. My dog shuffles out of the bedroom and lies his warm body next to mine. Children scream in Gaza. The rich have stolen the world. And when you’re gone, cries Smith, it makes me stronger knowing that all of this will carry on with someone else, someone new. It’s not like there’s gonna be nothing, is it?
I stumbled across an old Chumbawamba record recently and realized Yard Act is a spiritual successor. If you know, you know.