The Best Wishes On Both Ends Extended

The New Pornographers “We End Up Together”

“We End Up Together” came out eight years ago, and ever since I periodically come back to it to obsess over the implication of the title phrase. In the context of the music, it’s played like this triumph of inevitability, a celebration of abandoning free will. But I know enough that this song is in some way about Carl Newman and his wife, so I think it’s meant to be sort of tender? “We end up together” surely would come across as unambiguously romantic in other contexts, but as dramatic as this song gets it never conveys that sort of feeling. It’s mostly pensive and melancholy until the bombast kicks in, and even that part feels a bit cold and distant. The chorus is an expression of distracted confusion: “You looked like you were saying something.” This song is very lost in its head.

This isn’t a song about a relationship so much as it’s about everything that leads up to the relationship – generations of family history, social and cultural context, the damage of living and loving and searching until you finally find someone to settle down with. “We End Up Together” seems to come from the perspective of the moment just after the deal is sealed and the story finally becomes clear. All of this, everything, was leading to this thing that now seems, in retrospect, to be destiny: We end up together.

Buy it from Amazon.