[Songs My Son Should Know] Kings of Leon | Arizona

When it comes to the Kings of Leon, there are so many odious demonstrations by the band, that they could teach a volume of lessons before they begin strumming one, single, solitary note. 

1) Don't believe your hype
2) Don't overextend your boundaries
3) Don't insult your admirers
4) Don't become a rocketdouche Sooner fan.

And while The Kings are a case study in buffoonery, they also come with certain caveats, because we, as humans, tend to egregiously apologize for our athletes and artists as reimbursement for making us feel so fucking thrilled all the time.

When this album was released, it was a massively transitional time for your mother and I -- the kind of transition that makes you nearly collapse from dread had the circumstances surrounding it happened any differently.

In the complicated pre-summer of 2007, there was a very slight sliver of opportunity where it was going to be possible for your mother and I to meet, hit it off, and eventually decide that a relationship was worth the tokens for admission.  Any sooner than that small window, and the complications of other circumstances fold the relationship before it even begins -- and any time after those three days, we ride out our final days of the school year having never met, mommy moves on to New York by autumn, and your daddy continues to grind it out, never knowing the fugitive of an alternate universe that is this life.

This song reminds me so much of those three compelling days; probably on an iPod playlist I built to drift along with my in Phoenix -- because that is what people do in Phoenix, they drift.  It probably never extended past its initial song: Arizona.

The laze of the melody speaks intricately about the melancholy of isolated, desert living.  I always called Phoenix The City of Dreamers, because so many people there had other ideas about where they would end up -- in some far-off exotic locale -- and just how they were gonna do it.  Rarely did someone forget to remind you of their ambitions.  Dreamers.  In the face of easy, comfortable living, nobody appeared to be exactly satisfied with their open-ended drift.  Living in Arizona was like renting temporary space in a broken heart.  Don Draper said it better then I can, "Tell them that it didn't work out because it didn't. Tell them the next thing will be better because it always is."

And I don't think he was very inaccurate with that statement, for here we are now.  And this is how we did it.