Before I properly dove into the world of Ween in the autumn of 2015, The Mollusk was the first album I listened to by the band a year and a bit earlier. Like many others out there, I heard ‘Ocean Man’ at the end of the SpongeBob movie, liked it and added it to the old iTunes library. (I’d already known ‘Daisies’, ‘Freedom of ’76’ and ‘Loop de Loop’ by seeing them at various points on the TV, which left me confused because they all didn’t sound they were made by the same people. But this is way besides the point.) ‘Ocean Man’ was the only Ween song sitting in that library for a while. So one day when I was chilling in my uni room, I thought “Why not?” and listened to the record in its entirety. Probably one of the best decisions I’ve made in this lifetime. I was 18 by the time this was going on, but it felt like the album should have been a longtime favourite of mine by that point. Was definitely a “Where has this been all my life?” kind of thing.

How suitable that the last song on The Mollusk is the final one from the album I’ll be talking about on here. There’s not a lot of love for ‘She Wanted to Leave’ that I’ve seen online. I’ve read other people saying that the album should have ended with ‘Ocean Man’, which I don’t understand. I like the song myself, but as an album closer? I think I’d really be wanting more. And ‘She Wanted…’ brings it all home with a sort of unexpected emotional ending. It’s a breakup song, “straight Richard Thompson” according to Dean Ween, but instead of the usual guy-girl clichés, Gene Ween sings from the perspective of a man who’s completely left out to dry and lost for words after their lady’s been wooed away by a bunch of pirates. Left broken by the whole ordeal, he goes straight to the booze and wallows in his misery. Quite the sad way to end what is an incredibly fun album. In fact, the last words “For I’m not the man I used to be/And now I’m one of them” left such a mark initially that the sentiment inspired me to make a post about the best ending lines on an album.

So you’ll notice the song really ends about 2-and-a-half minutes into the runtime. Leaves you wondering, “Well, what else is there?” And a few moments later, these whooshing synths come in – I guess meaning to sound like these ominous breezes in the middle of the quiet ocean – before a familiar melody begins to play. It’s only a slowed down reprise of ‘I’m Dancing in the Show Tonight’, the song that started the whole record off and, by that point, in the closing moments seems so long ago. The little hidden touch puts a feather in the cap of the whole package. This is the way that the album should close out, and it was always meant to be. Clicking on the ‘the mollusk’ tag below will take you to the other songs from the album I’ve written posts for. And if I’d known it when I was doing the ‘B’ section, ‘The Blarney Stone’ and ‘Buckingham Green’ would have had their own articles too. It’s just how these things go sometimes.