—Please give this song a listen and tell me if you agree below. I’d love to hear your guys’ thoughts, as well as any other song selections that you believe would fit this same bill. Not sure how many of these posts I’ll make, but I wanted to, at the very least, bring this one to everyone’s attention; I see this to be as good a starting point as any for this sorta thing.

—Have loved both this track, and I assume like most here, The Last Of Us franchise in its entirety for many many years. For this very reason, it is more than fortunate that a song that so aptly captures the specific themes and sentimentality underlying the games in their exploration of the human condition. Imagery of “old and rusted cadillac[s]”, expressionless morning’s of weariness and dread, speech of a thousand words before an audience of a thousand more empty seats (the prospect of loneliness), and to this extent, a love that shapes an unyielding bond between two individuals no matter the scarcity of the people and places there to witness it are all so deeply reminiscent of ellie and joel’s journey across the states; a journey so effortlessly conflicted by the same woes and hardships that come across in ray’s interpretation of a life as seemingly derelict of hope and opportunity as the world of twisted characters and faces to which it embraces. This song embodies joel’s distrust of a better tomorrow in the same way that pearl jam’s “Future Days” highlights his intense desire of one; this duality is onset by the death of his only child and brought to change with the genesis of his love for ellie, such that it is at exactly the same time that he lowers his guard to accept a tender-heartedness within that his fate is sealed from the outside. Joel has always been empty, and this track is but a perfect example of why he remained this way until the bitter end.