B-Side Guys

Jacob Tell’s self-description as “sleepwalking through the bizarro timeline” becomes artistic manifesto on “One Final Thought of You,” released twenty-seven days ago. The track operates through deliberate dissociation—cataloging possibilities and actions while remaining fundamentally disconnected from their emotional weight. This isn’t numbness as pathology but numbness as survival strategy, a way of moving through a world that has become too strange to navigate consciously.

The opening inventory—”I can float to heaven/I can crash in hell/I can move to New York/I can buy or sell”—establishes infinite possibility as burden rather than freedom. Tell’s delivery treats these dramatic potential futures with identical emotional weight, creating unsettling equation between transcendence and commerce, between geographic escape and spiritual transformation. This leveling effect captures something essential about contemporary existence: when everything feels possible, nothing feels particularly meaningful.

The track’s emotional center arrives through absence rather than presence. “Those words were never for me/There were other sacred cows” reveals the narrator as witness to someone else’s commitment ceremony, standing close enough to offer support (“I talked you through your vows”) while remaining fundamentally excluded from the central narrative. This positioning—intimate observer of someone else’s most important moment—creates the particular ache that drives the entire composition.

Tell’s approach to the recurring question—”How can I hold onto?/One final thought of you?”—treats memory as both necessity and impossibility. The phrasing suggests desperation disguised as casual inquiry, someone trying to preserve something that may have already dissolved beyond retrieval. This formal choice transforms the chorus from mere repetition into escalating panic, each iteration carrying additional weight as the possibility of genuine preservation diminishes.

Perhaps most effectively, the track captures the specific loneliness of LA living through careful attention to detail. “Hang nothing on my walls” and “Go out to karaoke” create portrait of someone occupying space without claiming it, participating in social rituals without genuine connection. The city becomes perfect backdrop for this emotional suspended animation—a place where you can be entirely alone while surrounded by millions of others attempting the same feat.

The final admission—”I’ve been feeling kinda lonely/I’ve been feeling kinda sad/I’ve been feeling kinda aimless/Well… It ain’t all that bad”—captures the exhausting effort required to minimize genuine suffering. That deflating “Well… It ain’t all that bad” reveals someone who has learned to distrust their own emotional responses, treating pain as overreaction rather than valid information.

“One Final Thought of You” succeeds because it documents the specific form of contemporary disconnection where endless possibility becomes its own form of imprisonment. Through careful attention to the gap between what we can do and what we actually want, Tell has created something that feels necessary rather than merely cathartic.