An elegy is a poem of mourning for someone who has died. The one Micah wrote as Hollow Star circles a single word for its entire length and holds it back until the final line. He wrote the lyric in about ten minutes in 2017, shortly after learning that a goodbye party was being planned for Kevin Stramer, a friend of more than twenty years who died after five years with cancer.

The lyric argues itself into a corner. It opens on the line “I don’t want to say hello,” and the reasoning arrives in short, broken phrases: a hello commits two people to a farewell someday. Between those refusals, the narrator settles accounts, having already said everything worth saying and given every kiss, then stating the love outright twice in case it ever went unnoticed. The final section keeps starting the dreaded sentence and stalling, until the last line finally lets the word go: goodbye.

“Elegy” was the first song Micah ever wrote words-first, and the music came days later just as fast, apart from an arpeggiated guitar break in the middle. An arpeggio spells a chord out one note at a time, the technique Johnny Marr made the Smiths’ signature, and Micah measures his writing against Marr and the Cure’s Robert Smith. He fought that passage for hours past midnight, went to bed nearly hating the whole song, and loved it the next morning. Placing those separated notes at the center of a lyric that can’t finish its sentence was the right instinct.

The song’s strength is its patience. Most elegies begin after the loss. Hollow Star’s ends at the moment of it, and saving that one word for the closing line gives it more weight than a eulogy’s worth of praise could.