B-Side Guys

Patience runs out at different speeds for different people. For Justin Webb, it apparently runs out somewhere around the second verse: “I won’t sit another goddamn second / I’m tired of waiting on you.” The line lands like a door kicked open, and the song has been building pressure toward it since the first note.

“Vicariously” is about the specific misery of stasis, the feeling that life is supposed to be moving and isn’t, and that someone or something is responsible for the delay. Webb and his band have always worked in emotionally direct rock, and Nashville producer Jared Reynolds, whose credits include Ben Folds and Hayes Carll, gives the track room to build before it breaks open. The guitar-driven release the song earns in its second half doesn’t feel manufactured. It feels inevitable.

The lyric that sticks is the weirder one: “count my years / in cans of beers / and acting weird / it’s everything I do.” It’s self-aware in a way the rest of the song isn’t, a sudden flash of dark humor inside all that frustration. The narrator isn’t just stuck waiting on someone else. He’s watching himself kill time in ways he’s not particularly proud of, which complicates the outward-facing anger just enough to keep the song honest.

The chorus offering to let someone “live through me vicariously” reads less as generosity than exhausted sarcasm. Here, take it. Since you seem so interested in how I’m spending it.