A note on the mediocrity:

We have to be clear on why Colin Meloy finds the song "mediocre" (lit. middle of the road, not bad but not special). I don't know Colin personally, so of course I can't really make a definitive statement, but my attitude of the same is informed by the song’s literalness. And this probably doesn't mean much to someone who has not tried to write a song or a book before, so I wanted to comment on it.

People always have these excited memories about their childhood favorites, their favorite songs, their favorite books, the things they really connected with. But the craft in design for these works is usually that, the thing you connected with, is not literally in the artwork. Instead the artwork sits around it, the artwork gestures at it. You have an idea of this character as this lonely solitary brute who 15-year-old-you really identified with because you had just come out of hitting puberty early or whatever, but if you really look at the character descriptions, it turns out that most of your impression is formed by other people in the narrative wanting the character to say something and they just don't.

This creates a really plastic space which people mold into their own viewpoint, they take it and make it relatable to them. Eco calls a novel a “lazy machine,” to make it really special I need to trust that laziness, I need to trust my reader to fill in the gaps that I do not. For instance, the hulking brute above—did you understand that to be a guy or a girl?

When Dave Matthews charted it was with “Take these chances / Place them in a box until a / Quieter time, lights down, you up and die.” What chances? What box? What quieter time? We get vignettes or a humdrum existence, of dreams of how it was simpler, and it resonated because it tapped into a nostalgic yearning for a simpler life, a fatalistic concern about the finitude of life... But the character is only seen in dotted-outline silhouette, a blank slate that we paint with our own stories.

Same when Colin sings “And nobody nobody knows / Let the yoke fall from our shoulders / Don't carry it all, don't carry it all / We are all our hands and holders / Beneath this bold and brilliant sun / And this I swear to all.” What yoke? What sun? Who is “we”? The song sketches its theme, a theme of goodbyes, of picking up where others left off, of being assured that they will pick up what you leave off, of community and family and transition. But again, the details are just gestured at, you are invited to set yourself into the narrative, personalize and connect.

ChatGPT’s chorus is “Of sailors brave, and adventures untold / Of a life on the waves, and a heart grown old / Of a world of discovery, waiting to be sought / In a song that will live, when he is not.” What sailors? Well, the companions of the Mariner who shall not be named, he apparently had splendid friends. What adventure? Again, the adventure of the Mariner, who apparently had a splendid time. The only hope for the song is that the “song that will live” is going to be presented in this work: that we are going to see a key change and the Old Man’s Song will turn out to be the climax of the piece, we will dramatically insert ourselves and become the Old Man, dramatically ending with some crescendo, “these splinters I will cling to / the battered sail fills up with might / these are the fallen friends I drink to: / I go out alone, but I'm not dying tonight!” and for just one hair-on-end minute we feel that Odyssean determination to set out on one last ambitious venture before we die. But of course we never get that because ChatGPT is trying to create something cohesive where we want something emotional.