You know, Beaver, I’m afraid you have the wrong attitude. And if you don’t start buckling down and applying yourself, one of these days you’re gonna come up against a test or something, and find out you’re way behind the rest of the class. And you’re going to be a very sorry young man. — Ward Cleaver, Leave It to Beaver (Beaver’s IQ)

Long ago in a grocery store parking lot far away, I rode on a miniature merry-go-round, one of those with five colorfully-painted ponies, each perhaps large enough to lift a sack of potatoes. As our posse raced in slow motion across the circular prairie, a girl swiveled in her saddle and, pointing in turn to each of her fellow riders, announced, I’m ahead of you and you and you and you!

Those who are amazed by the prose that appears in these pages may be unsurprised to hear that I was a slow learner. When I was four years old my mom had me tested to make sure there was nothing wrong with me that couldn’t be cured through a generous application of guilt. So when our self-appointed leader on the carousel said she was ahead of me, I was happy to accept her assessment, including the assertion that her horse was ahead of the one into whose tail her mount was staring.

With ‘Wear Your Worry,’ LIT. MAJOR explores the sensation that everyone on this Great Hamster Wheel of Life is running faster than us, loping along towards their eventual and inevitable demise with more grace and agility than we can hope to muster. That ‘knowledge’ is pervasive in a world in which social media allows us to see with our own eyes just how well our peers are progressing. No one doing poorly would post a smiling-with-their-partner-and/or-dog selfie, would they?

You don’t wear your worry
Like a dress no more
You let it fall down
In a mess to the floor
You don’t wear you worry
Like a dress no more
I’m so jealous of you
I can’t bear it anymore

In November, Gustave Flaubert wrote, ‘…Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level.’ But Flaubert never signed up for Instagram; he was obviously more of a Twitter type, perpetually poised on the roof, prepared to leap from the shingled precipice into the Leaf Pile of Incoherence that awaits us a mere three meters below our feet.

‘Wear Your Worry’ is a beautiful song, delivered with a delicate vibrato reminiscent of Jeff Buckley. Listen for the tasteful banjo and the piano figure that trips down the steps of the chorus. I especially appreciate the harmonies that gracefully navigate the almost-too-adventurous key changes.

Based in Connecticut, LIT. MAJOR self-describes as Jeremy / 27 / Sad song singer. ‘Wear Your Worry’ is the third single from his soon-to-be-released album, Fiction. Musicians on the track include LM (guitar, vocals), Callum Foulds (piano), Ross Ingram (electric guitar), Luke Janke (banjo), and Zach Sorenson (bass).

The music of LIT. MAJOR is available on Bandcamp, Spotify, and Apple Music. And be sure to follow LIT. MAJOR on Instagram and Twitter.