Ball of Wax 61 Songs: Colin Ernst – “Make It Through”

Colin Ernst‘s “Make It Through” does a brilliant job of summing up the absurdity, terror, tension and trauma of our current moment in a catchy (and even kinda whimsical?) pop song, whose whistled hook will likely not leave your brain for days. The lyrics are dense and rich with detail, with lines like “no one knows when we’ll be free to meet / at a distance of less than six feet / so we can’t stop yelling / through a mask and waving from afar” piling up the 2020 tension, building to the semi-cathartic release of the chorus. Appropriately enough, by the time we get there, “make it through another day” does feel like an achievement worth celebrating – a feeling that resonates with us all, I should think. This song may well sound dated in a year, or five, or ten – at least I certainly hope it does – but it should also prove to be an indelible musical time capsule of this moment, along the lines of “No Depression” or “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” I, for one, look forward to dusting off the CD player and playing this for my grandkids, telling them all about the strange, dark time this country went through way back in 2020.