You only gotta do one thing well to make it in this world, babe / You got a woman waiting for you there / All you ever gotta do is be a good man one time to one woman / And that’ll be the end of the road, babe — ‘Cry Baby’ by Bert Berns and Jerry Ragovoy (as performed by Janis Joplin)

My father’s father died before I was born and my parents never spoke of him. But once, when I was alone with her, my Mamaw went off on the poor guy and spent twenty minutes telling me that he had been a worthless, unambitious pushover who never accomplished anything in his life and left her with nothing (though I’ll interject that he’d had the good sense to purchase mortgage life insurance, so her tiny four-room house was paid off when he died). Then Mamaw concluded her tirade by saying, But he sure was easy to live with.

I must have inherited my grandfather’s non-ambition gene because my resume bears no noteworthy accomplishments. My greatest achievement took place exactly three years ago when, in a brief moment of clarity, I asked Diann to marry me. Since then, all I’ve had to do is stay calm and plant flowers in the back yard.

In ‘Passing Through,’ Ghost Fan Club presents a person who is just along for the ride on the Tourist Bus of Life, a somnambulist who senses that there is something wrong with sitting in steerage and watching the scenery drift by for days without number.

Another morning
6 am just falling asleep
Birds outside remind me
Of what I’ve always known
I’m not living I’m just passing through

I contend that listening to the birds stir to life each morning is not the worst thing one can do with their life. When I reach the Great Beyond, I hope that St. Peter — after eyeballing my CV — will say, ‘Well, you didn’t really do much down there, but the monarch butterflies enjoyed the pentas you planted. C’mon in.’

‘Passing Through’ is beautifully slow-moving pop. A handful of isolated guitar notes create a bare arrangement, the ticking of two clocks, one on either side of the bed so that a stirred sleeper need not turn over to tell the time.

Ghost Fan Club is a solo project of Tyler Costolo of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Tyler describes Ghost Fan Club as the quiet emo partner of their other project, the metal and loud Two Meters. Both projects feature home-recorded tracks, highly personal lyrics, and plenty of guitars.

The music of Ghost Fan Club is available on Bandcamp, Spotify, and Apple Music. And be sure to follow Two Meters on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.