My obsession with words and creating is a fruitful byproduct of my illness, but it comes at a cost. “ It ain’t that bad, it could always be worse / I’m running out of gas / Hardly anything left / Hope I make it home from work,” Mac continues on the hook of “Good News.” There’s something about your art and your work becoming one, and people thinking you’re okay because you’re producing. And can I blame them? At my lowest, I am wholly inconsolable.
When I am at my worst, no one knows what to say or how to help me. It looks like ten articles in a week and pitches galore, but it feels like holding your breath for hours.
When I feel my best, my visible and accessible best, I’m usually seconds away from a manic romp. Do I wake up eventually? For sure, why not? Mac wakes up, eventually, too.īut “ Good news, good news, good news, that’s all they wanna hear / No, they don’t like it when I’m down / But when I’m flying, oh, I make ‘em so uncomfortable.” That’s the trick question of this article. It’s nothing but a slow slipping into a deep and finally restful sleep. There are no tears or fantasies about funerals. When I think of taking my life, I think of a long-awaited and long-term slumber. It’s the wish for some peace of mind for a prolonged period, maybe forever. It’s not this tremendous depressive swell threatening to take me under. That’s what suicidal ideation looks like to me, too. Sure, you’re making yourself better, but who has the energy for constant self-improvement? Don’t we all deserve to just lay down for a while? Every little thing you do for yourself results in three more little things to do until your entire life becomes rife with little things. This “living” business… It’s all perpetually tiresome to an incomprehensible degree. So when Mac sings, “ Maybe I’ll lay down for a little / Instead of always trying to figure everything out,” I know what he means. The thought of suicide, of ridding myself of myself to ease the burden, comes at the most mundane times. It’s much more romantic to think of the tragic writer sitting at their desk with a bottle of whiskey, cigarette butts littered about, and a body, on its final breaths, splayed over the desk.
It’s incredible how suicidal ideation can seize you in broad daylight. I hear his question and realize I’ve asked myself the same thing hundreds of times.
“ Why does everybody need me, to stay?” he asks. He’s just doing a little spring cleaning up there.Īs with “Come Back to Earth,” Mac laments his time-not in his head, but on earth itself. “Good News” unfolds several times over-with the first arc of the song pattering up and up, higher and higher, as Mac says, “ I spent the whole day in my head.” It’s not a far cry from 2018’s Swimming opener “Come Back to Earth” (“ I just need a way out of my head”). He is giving over as much of himself as he can muster. When he slips into his achy vocal, we know he is as sincere as humanly possible. Since 2016 and the start of Mac’s third creative renaissance, singing has become a trademark of Malcolm’s. When he’s not speaking to us, his voice slips into a horizontal melody, one that lulls and coos. Malcolm’s spoken voice tiptoes around the light pluckings of a guitar. Mac Miller’s “Good News,” the first single off his first posthumous release, Circles, releasing January 17, 2020, is five glorious minutes of gentle and tender singing and songwriting. “ Can I get a break?” Mac laments, and I realize he’s speaking directly to me. They want to look up to you while you’re busy straining against the ceiling. They want to hear about your great accomplishments at impossible rates. People want to hear how you sprung up and wrote 15 articles in two weeks, in a tizzy. That’s the sickness of a manic episode, of knowing you can’t come down, you can’t break free, of knowing you cannot go anywhere. When Mac says, “ Oh, I hate the feeling, when you high but you underneath the ceiling,” I hear him in my spirit.