Ask if you are happy and you cease to be so. Pleasure gives way to pain in equal measure. The rain pounds down, then clears up, and the clouds part, and then… nothing much happens. Life is an exhilarating rollercoaster ride of exquisite human misery. At some point, most of us find ourselves forced to either a) numb out and fossilize or b) take solace in some sort of spiritual practice.

Every practice is both unique to the individual and also necessarily communal, even if it requires a community of those with nothing in common. Nu Nashville country avatar Jason Aldean has no public-facing spiritual practice, but I’d guess it’s some sort of protestant Christianity mixed with generalized small-town wholesomeness. Minnesotan semi-post-rock stalwarts Low are quite open in their practice of Mormonism, an even less plausible spin on Christianity that’s about a century behind every major Civil Rights advance. Me, I’m partial to secular Buddhism.

The first noble truth of Buddhism is, “life is suffering.” There is a way out of suffering, which is the renunciation of craving and the wholesale acceptance of life on life’s terms. You probably won’t get there in this lifetime, but you can always rest in the fifth noble truth, “it’s fun to listen to music with your favorite people in the cabin of a motor vehicle.”

Jason Aldean’s “Days Like These” is the closing track from his 2010 album My Kinda Party, a monster success bursting with better-known hit singles. It’s a song about driving around in a truck, air-guitaring to loud music, and making affirmative noises toward your companion. It includes a Tarantino-equse lyrical digression into foot-fetishism (“Put your feet up on the dash / Leave your toe prints on the glass”), but it’s more squarely about our tendency to cling to the fleeting chemical rush of the good times, compromising our enjoyment through our compulsive attempts to stretch it out, and probably hastening the apocalypse by burning too many dinosaur bones.

Like most A-list country stars from the last couple of decades, Aldean is less indebted to Hanks I, Jr, or III than he is to adult-contemporary soft-rock – if also distinguished by his awkward affinity for rap, which he shares with a lot of Southern white guys around his age – and “Days Like These” sounds like little more than a watered-down version of U2’s “Beautiful Day.” But some days are, indeed, better than others, it’s hard to let go of the good ones, and Aldean’s lyrics get points for poignant honesty.

His “Days Like These” also provides a service by making Low’s “Days Like These” sound like a Buddhist “Bohemian Rhapsody” in comparison.

Thirty years into its career as a cult band (so to speak!), Low credits its longevity to the powers of prayer and monogamy, but that’s not enough to hold off the pain of the world. (You would think that, if Mormonism were the correct religion, it would be worth more than fawning reviews in Pitchfork, but I digress!) Comprised of aching choral melodies and shards of noise, Low’s 2021 album HEY WHAT is a devastating late-career masterpiece that could have only arisen from the peculiar claustrophobic trauma of the COVID epoch.

The two-part centerpiece of HEY WHAT starts with “Hey,” a lacerating ode to a broken human connection that dissolves into icy ambience and then abruptly cuts to “Days Like These,” a triptych with a stark and minimalist first part, a jagged and distorted second part, and a long section of abstract bleep-bloops at the end.

Lyrically, the days that Low’s “Days Like These” is about are not necessarily “good” ones. It’s a song about growing up enough to get some perspective and then realizing life can still cold-cock you with shocks and disappointments that still leave you reeling like a heartbroken high-school freshman. What’s worse, part of you will never stop craving “that one sure thing” that makes it all okay. And while you may still be able to squeeze out a bit of minty pleasure from the bottom of life’s toothpaste tube, “you’re never going to feel complete / No, you’re never going to be released,” at least until you die, at which point you’re at least guaranteed the smug satisfaction of finding out that the Mormons were wrong.

Low’s “Days Like These” is a more impressive artistic creation than Jason Aldean’s “Days Like These” in nearly every respect. But each is more impressive, in its own way, in contrast to the other, so we’re better off with both of them. Also, my therapist wants me to listen to less stuff like Low and more stuff like Jason Aldean, and she has a postgraduate education.

May you live in interesting times, and may they be occasionally punctuated by the pleasure of driving around with someone you adore without condition, listening to music you’re still uncool enough to enjoy.

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