Throwback Thursday: Nate Ruess, ‘It Only Gets Much Worse’

Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly series showcasing an album, single, music video or performance of a bygone era and its personal and/or cultural significance.

Someone’s last breathe is as dried roses crackling and crumbling between porcelain, untouched fingertips. The petals are all brown and veiny, displaying the exact decay that is startling and wholly unavoidable. It’s an inevitable rite of passage for all of us, mere mortals whose coils will soon perish in a sour green-blue water to reemerge in either a heavenly state of bliss or a lake of fire. Even as spectators, who must then cling with all our might onto ever-elusive memories, faces and places, the outward ripple through time is insurmountable and almost inconceivable. Pop carpenter Nate Ruess, most famously known as frontman of fun., allows himself to carry his own dusty relic of pain, turning the knick-knack over in his hands, which are swarthy but gentle. He tries not to bruise the remarkable miniature, but time has already done quite enough damage.

With “It Only Gets Much Worse,” the shining beacon of his 2015 solo debut record, Grand Romantic, he poeticizes on the past’s looming presence and the tragic spiral out of this realm of his mother. “I was born before the storm / My mother placed a dozen thorns / The ‘sorry’s and the ‘take it back’s / Lay silent in her folded hands,” he unmasks with the icy, wholly destructive opening lines. The vivid imagery twirls into oblivion, almost as an after-life hymn cutting through from the other side into the physical world. Ruess upends the laws of physics to frame the sheer gutting power of loss and chooses to celebrate such devastation, rather than avoid it altogether. He later sings, “And head to headstone I just danced / Oblivious to consequence / As a mourning sank into the ground / The highest branch / I sought it out…”

His tears are caked on his cheekbones, acting as dark, blood-red rouge to highlight the sunken impact. As he grows and learns to flourish in this life, as best he can, discarding the sorrow as a snake with dead skin, he comes to know himself in a more sobering, muted and cool light. A tragedy of yesteryear never really vanished, though; it just became engrained in his every movement, his footsteps scorching the earth beneath him and his hands turning everything to lifeless plaster. “All your love may fade away / All you’ll become may all go to waste,” he sings on the hook, confronting the stunning truth chest-to-chest. “So I can’t stand to hear you say it hurts / When it only gets much worse / It only gets much worse…”

Ruess’ voice rings as clear as crystal, giving the orchestral theatrics even more melodrama. He’s a moody, brooding force that blows in from each corner of the globe, and the puffy clouds unfurl like an oriental rug in monstrous licks and tormented tremors. “It Only Gets Much Worse,” which he co-wrote with Jess Bhasker (Kanye West, Mark Ronson), fellow fun. player Andrew Dost and author Sloane Crosley, is a visceral, bone-chilling, all-consuming fire of a performance that is as ever-present as it is solidified in pop’s ancient pantheon, emptied of its every light source for the dank, deserted dungeons full of cob webs and spiders. But ultimately, he’s far stronger and capable now than he could ever have imagined before.

Listen below:

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