It's a little after 10:30pm local time, and it occurred to me a few minutes ago that despite being already 21 days into June I hadn't yet listened to "June Hymn" by The Decemberists. I've just remedied myself of this, and I highly recommend you do the same if you haven't already. I absolutely adore this song. It's from The King is Dead, the album where the distinctly British-folk-influenced Decemberists took a hard pivot into their homeland's Americana. It's sort of a companion piece to an earlier song on the album, "January Hymn."1 The two make an interesting counterpoint to each other. "January" is a song of melancholy and worry, of a love that ended prematurely and a singer left wondering what could have been. "June," meanwhile, is a song of peace and beauty. It is a song about taking a moment and noticing just how lucky you are, how beautiful the world around you is, how much love you have for the people in your life. Life is not without its hardships, but how fortunate it is we even get to live at all and how fortunate we are to experience so many wonders. To me, this song is the meaning of life, or at least represents a place where I long to be someday.
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According to Decemberists frontman and songwriter Colin Meloy, originally these songs were going to be called "Winter Hymn" and "Summer Hymn," but changed to their current titles when Fleet Foxes released their own "White Winter Hymnal" before the King is Dead recording sessions.