To quote a meme of recent provenance: if I had a nickel for every time an early-2000s side-project on SubPop Records went mainstream and overshadowed its artist’s main band, I’d have two nickels–which isn’t a lot, but is still wild that it’s happened twice.

One was Postal Service, Ben Gibbard’s electronic side-project whose sole album Give Up became a surprise platinum selling success in 2003–albeit in that case Ben Gibbard used Give Up‘s immense popularity as a launching pad to help his more traditional Rock band Death Cab for Cutie gain some mainstream recognition as well, strangely refusing to ever follow-up the single biggest record of his career.

The other example was The Shins, which started life as James Mercer’s side-project away from his main gig Flake Music–an obscure old Albuquerque band that doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page. Hence Mercer had no truck with abandoning his first band for The Shins when their song “New Slang” caught the ear of Indie stalwarts SubPop in 2001, becoming the breakout hit from The Shins’ debut record Oh, Inverted World!–and again three years later when “New Slang” featured in the 2004 film Garden State, specifically the famous scene wherein Natalie Portman’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl puts her headphones over Zach Braff’s ears and plays him a song she promises will change his life–which elevated The Shins from mere Indie-darlings who occasionally licensed their songs out to McDonald’s and car commercials to make ends meet, to a full-fledged Pop-Cultural sensation.

The band’s sophomore album then, 2003’s Chutes Too Narrow, occupies the odd position of being the follow-up to the band’s break-out album a full year before it actually became their breakout album. It tries to build off the underground buzz of the first record all while utterly unaware that it is about to be superseded by their first record yet again (perhaps that’s why it’s the last great Shins album–it was the last one produced without the oppressive weight of Great Expectations; James Mercer would never make a record this quick again). It is somehow both follow-up and predecessor. Given how much The Shins’ music in general, and Chutes Too Narrow in particular, is the sound of a youngish man caught in the ever-unresolved ambivalence of what to do with his life, this album’s liminal position is strangely apropos.

The album title comes from track four “Young Pilgrim,” which finds James Mercer at his most seasonally depressive. “A cold and wet November dawn,” he opens, “And there are no barking sparrows/Just this emptiness to dwell upon,” as he “fell into a winter slide” and ends up feeling like “the kind of kid who goes down chutes too narrow”–trapped, stuck, slow-moving, feeling despondently unsatisfied by activities that used to excite him as a child. It is, as the kids say these days, a mood.

So much of the song, then, is him simply trying to talk himself out of this seasonal depression, reminding himself that “Of course I was raised to gather courage from those/Lofty tales so tried and true,” all of which he acknowledges not to dis these “lofty tales,”` but to recommend that same strategy to the listener: “If you’re able I’d suggest it ’cause this/Modern thought can get the best of you.” He likewise reminds himself that “Fate isn’t what we’re up against, there’s no design, no flaws to find,” that it is only the sad thoughts within our own heads we need to overcome, not some vast conspiracy.

Yet even if these reminders all feel a little trite, he also knows that the stakes are very much not, repeatedly singing in the chorus, “But I learned fast how to keep my head up ’cause I/Know I got this side of me that/Wants to grab the yoke from the pilot and just/Fly the whole mess into the sea.” The line is in part an expression of the singer’s awareness of his own suicidal ideation, or at least self-destructive tendencies, that he knows he needs to keep in check; yet also of his impulse towards destroying everyone else around him while he’s at it.

How much of the contemporary ethos of Silicon Valley and Wall Street is to “move fast and break stuff”–which indeed are the only two things they do well anymore? Back in Chutes Too Narrow‘s 2003 milieu, how many American voters were perfectly satisfied with launching a second invasion of a foreign country so soon after the first, alongside the concurrent immolation of America’s civil liberties, international reputation, and moral authority? How many voters today are content to fly the whole mess into the sea–choosing tariffs, rapists, mass-deportations, mass-layoffs–as a way to project and deflect onto immigrants their own chronic self-hatred? Is that not the end-game of the Book of Mormon: a people who grew to hate themselves so much that they willfully started a genocidal war against a much larger opponent, rejecting all repentance and divine aid until they were utterly destroyed?

And maybe I’m getting lost in my own seasonal depression a bit here. But I also can’t help but feel that John Mercer was right, that it is healthier to be aware of that side of yourself “that wants to fly the whole mess into the sea” than it is to ignore it entirely. Maybe everything around us does deserve to be destroyed, “to fly the whole mess into the sea”—that such in fact has been firmly prophesied—but only One to come is authorized to do it. The rest of us are to repent, to have charity even if no one else does, to let our depressions make us kinder, not worse, and endure to the end.