B-Side Guys

Eliza Noxon has written a birthday song every year since she turned seventeen. “One More Round” is the one she wrote at twenty-one, the first birthday she’d be older than her brother, who died in 2019. Two voices argue over how to occupy a life, one healing and one still broken, both trying to speak at once.

The argument is audible in the text. “I’m glad that I’m breathing / I’m glad I’m still here” gives way immediately to “I just don’t know how to do this for another goddamn year.” The middle section fractures into self-criticism that accelerates and contradicts itself, “be kind to yourself” arriving in the same breath as “you don’t even care / get in line.” Then: “I feel fine.” Three times, each one slightly less convincing than the last.

The resolution the song reaches for comes from her brother directly. He loved the Talmudic teaching that we should carry two slips of paper: one reading “the world was created for me,” the other “I am but dust and ashes.” He’d said he wanted the phrases tattooed on his arms. Noxon closes the song by weaving them together, “I am but ash and dust / the world is for me,” repeated four times until the two irreconcilable truths occupy the same line. The tension between them is the point. Her brother knew that. The song is how she learned it.

Produced by Rilo Kiley bassist Pierre de Reeder, Good Monsters with Bad Habits holds this material with the care it requires without softening any of it.