I like the song "Ativan" by Shallowater a lot

2025-10-22

Shallowater - Ativan

This has been one of my favorite tracks these past couple months. So many of my favorite qualities in music inhabits this song.

• Wonderful, warm and full production. The bass is envelopes you, the guitars are bright and sharp. The vocals are placed so perfectly in the mix. It's a song I love putting my headphones on for.
• Cryptic / terse writing with just enough to chew to establish a foothold on some thesis.
• It doesn't stay too long, nor does it leave too early
• Multiple movements, that don't feel disconnected but have their own complete identity. Where you can't imagine them being their own songs, but if you seeked to some random moment, you'd think you were on a different track.
• You can't shuffle the song structure around. Sometimes you listen to a bad pop song and think "anything could go anywhere", not this song however.
• A mighty crescendo, one that I just love to replay over and over, but isn't the only worthwhile thing on the song.

There are so many individual musical moments that I love:

• The first instrumental passage, where the distortion really kicks in and it gets loud. It's just such a fun listen, and varied and so cathartic, within the context of the song (more on that later).
• Also in that same instrumental passage, you can this awesome rhythm guitar, but these uber bright (and still heavy) licks come through that add so much depth.
• The main musical motif the lead guitar plays. It's in every movement (maybe except in that first instrumental passage) but each edition is so wonderfully different from each other.
• Holy fucking shit, the end of the song. Utterly exorcising.
• How there's a slight pause in the crescendo, sleighting the end to the song. The first time you hear it you go "Aw man" and then giddy that it keeps on going. Then on further listens, you're excited to hear that pauce.

And I haven't even gotten to the writing! I don't want to do some deep lyrical analysis of this song. I think that would rob the magic of it, a bit. Please just listen to the song. But I will write what the themes of the song mean for me.

This past year has been difficult for me. My first full time job as a software engineer, it was really tough. I think mostly because I realized I had settled. I'm so driven by my ambition and then I decided to be steady. And I chose that, ha, could you imagine.

So a lot of what I used to feel, was gone. There was a moment where I think I couldn't really feel. I was upset at myself for that, but even that frustration felt dull, forced.

And so, that first verse, it resonanted

Don't give up on me
I'm not ready for the end yet
It doesn't have to be
As bad as it's been

See, I read this song as a down and out man, on his last legs, pathetically refusing to give up. And that's who I was.

I love how this tracks with the key and beat of the song. It's so somber and slow. And in his delivery, he just lingers and drags every moment, there's no sense that he's gonna leave any time soon.

I also love this couplet:

I'll look you in the eye
When you're speaking to me

And then the song kicks into high gear and ha, here's what I think. I think its symbolic of deciding to take your life into your hands. To do something. But it's ... well ... it doesn't always stick. Hence the shift down to a more calm (but admittedly more serene) final verse.

For a while, I was here. A constant yoyo-ing of turmoil and calm and dread. It didn't help that the only way I could live here (and not slip into that abyss of unfeeling) was some good-ole mental auto-immunity. I could feel myself pushing myself into my lowest of lows (November 2022, 01:00), and I wanted that, so dreadfully terribly.

Here's the namesake of the song:

A man can't live
On Ativan and ice chips

But they can keep him kickin'
They will keep him kickin'

"Emphasis mine"! Ha, I could've left it there. Sufficiently pithy and good for a blog post, but that's not really the end of is it? Not of the song, nor of how I feel right now.

See, I figured it out. No, I didn't find a way to be "happy" with what I had become. I would hate that, the idea of that disgusts me, the idea of a close friend telling me that makes me angry. Sorry, umm, anyway.

What I figured out was how to feel like who I used to be, who I am. It tooks a few things, over the course of a few months, but I got there. The specifics ... maybe for another blog post. But to get there. It is such a personal triumph, it feels like I'm able to close a chapter on a very dire part of my life. It feels like I've taken the right road, I haven't mistepped.

And that's what the end of the song sounds like.

As an aside, does anyone hear a lot of early 2000s indie influence in the vocal performance? À la sparklehorse, mount eeire, sufjan stevens?