Not a very festive or momentous song for the coming new year, I know. But these things aren’t planned. I just do whatever song is next on my phone. And on this New Year’s Eve the track is ‘I Saw Gener Cryin’ in His Sleep’, the thirteenth track on Ween’s major-label debut Pure Guava.

For any Ween fan reading (quite unlikely) wondering where I would place Pure Guava in my favourite albums of the band, I’ll say to you that it probably isn’t in my top five of theirs. To me it just feels like The Pod Part 2, though with less songs and… a bigger sound to it maybe? There’s a larger emphasis on grooves and the drums on Guava, but The Pod in itself is just a lot more interesting and has a lot more variety – no matter how out there it is. I only have four songs from Guava on my phone and for some reason ‘I Saw Gener’, which I feel a lot of people would probably skip over after a while, popped out to me on that first album listen in 2015 or so.

I guess it’s because Ween are known for being this silly band who make a lot of silly stuff (even though their music is actually amazing and you should listen to anything of theirs as soon as you can) and this song details an instance where things aren’t as they seem. Dean Ween – real name Mickey Melchiondo, affectionately known as Deaner by Ween fans – sings about seeing bandmate Gene Ween crying in his sleep and offers some advice to help him through bad times. It’s all a bit heavy.

However, it’s shoddily recorded and set to upbeat, bouncy music which completely overshadows the downbeat lyricism. The drum machines skip out of time and some points, the drum machine cymbals thrash about wildly, there’s some piercing feedback after the first chorus. It’s a great listen. It makes it so funny, but it’s not supposed to be. It’s so conflicting. But that’s the beauty of many a Ween song.

That’s the end of 2017. Hard to believe I revived this back in August when I was stuck at home relentlessly searching for jobs online. Now I have one. I start next week. Hopefully this is the start of something special. Will see you in 2018. Many more songs to come.