Rick's Piano — A Mantra in Retreat

Knock, knock. Who's there? Rick Rubin. Rick Rubin who? Rick Rubin's piano.

The second-to-last song on the heaviest record in the catalog opens with a knock-knock joke. Everybody in the room laughs. And then he says "enough fuckin' around," and the song spends the next six minutes asking what death feels like.

That's the whole song in miniature. The joke is real. The dread is real. They share a doorway.

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The Room

Here's the origin story, because it matters. It's 2014. Mac has drunk-dialed Rick Rubin from Europe and asked for help — actually said the words "I'm fucked up, will you help me" — and ended up spending the summer at Shangri-La, Rubin's studio-sanctuary in Malibu, getting clean. He'd go to Rick's house every day and just sit and play the keyboard.

His engineer Josh Berg — the voice on the other end of the knock-knock joke — told the story on Reddit: the first time Mac ever went to Rick's place, while he was waiting for Rick to come receive him, he recorded himself on his phone at Rick's piano. Just a kid alone in somebody else's sacred room, messing around on the man's instrument. Later they did a rough chop of that phone recording, looped it out, and built the song on top. Dylan Reynolds sang the hook. Mac did the verses. And then the ending — the whole "what does death feel like" section — was added in one stream of consciousness, layered roughly, and it was done.

One take. Rough layers. And it stayed that way for a decade, until the estate released Balloonerism on January 17, 2025.

Sit with that chain of custody for a second. A phone recording of a piano that belongs to a man who isn't home yet, chopped rough, looped, and never polished. The song is a found object wearing a found object. They could have re-cut the piano clean in any studio on earth. They didn't. The room tone is the song.

The Music

The loop is the first thing you feel. It's a few chords, phone-mic'd, slightly wobbly — you can hear that it wasn't played for a record, it was played for nobody, and that's exactly why it works. It sounds like waiting. Like the twenty minutes before the person you're hoping will fix you walks through the door.

Thundercat's bass comes in underneath and does what Thundercat's bass always does on these sessions — it moves like something alive and warm-blooded under a static surface. The piano loops; the bass breathes. Dylan Reynolds' voice on the refrain is soft, almost choir-boy clean, which is a hell of a choice for a song this dark. The prettiest thing in the arrangement is the thing saying "the best is yet to come." The production puts its most angelic texture on its most fragile claim.

And the mix stays rough. Listen to the outro — the vocals stack up loose, streams of "oh my God" layered over each other without being snapped to a grid. In 2014 Mac could produce as clean as anyone when he wanted to. He didn't want to here. The roughness isn't a demo limitation. It's the sound of not pretending.

The Verses — Same Sentence, Shrinking Faith

The structure is a prayer wheel. Short verse, refrain, short verse, refrain, five times around. And the trick the song plays is that the refrain never changes while the ground under it collapses. Verse one is guarded. Verse five is annihilation. The refrain answers both with the same words. By the end, "the best is yet to come" doesn't sound like belief anymore. It sounds like discipline — a thing you say because saying it is the practice, whether or not you currently believe it. Anyone who's ever been in recovery knows that sentence. You don't say it because it's true. You say it so it might become true.

Verse one is Mac refusing the medicine that makes people sick: praise. Please don't give me any credit, that's how people get jaded / Please don't nod your head, and please don't tell me I made it / 'Cause people start to get worse once they think they the greatest. And it opens with E.T.'s not dead, he's just a little bit faded — childhood magic not gone, just diluted. He's setting the terms: I'm not well, don't tell me I'm well, and definitely don't tell me I'm great. This is the man who spent the summer learning transcendental meditation from Rick Rubin telling you the most dangerous substance in the room is applause.

Verse two is where it starts cutting. I told her, "It get better soon" / I probably shoulda told her when she was in a better mood. Read that second line again. He's admitting the comfort was about timing, not truth — that "it get better soon" is a thing you can only say to someone who's already halfway okay, which means it was never really for her. It was for him. And then the devastating detail: She lookin' at me like, "Anyone, except for you." She isn't rejecting his help. She's looking around the room for anyone else to be the one who's right. He's the last acceptable savior. I had to go to California, she wished that I never moved — and now the geography doubles, because California is also where Shangri-La is. The move that saved him is the move that lost her.

Verse three goes metaphysical, but sideways, through broken senses. I wonder if the blind mice even wanna see / I wonder if a deaf father ever hear his daughter scream. These aren't philosophy-class questions. They're questions about whether the damaged even want repair, whether love can penetrate a body that can't receive it. And then: Is there a heaven? Can you see the god in me? I don't know, probably. The shrug at the end — "I don't know, probably" — is the most honest theology on the record. Not yes, not no. Probably.

Verse four is the one people glide past, and it's doing the quietest, saddest work on the song. I wonder if the truth come with a song / And if it do, will we ever get to sing along? — the whole career in two lines, the question of whether making the music gets you any closer to the thing the music is about. And then this domestic image: Spend her paycheck on that lingerie, she scared to put it on / She never let her boyfriend see her in a thong. That's hope kept in a drawer. She bought the thing — she spent money she couldn't spare on the belief that there's a version of herself worth dressing up for — and she can't wear it in front of the person who's supposed to love her. It's the whole refrain restated as a woman's private life: the best, purchased, unworn, yet to come.

Verse five is the turn, and it arrives with a body in the water. I shot myself on my birthday, fell into the ocean / Listened to their voices, I was lost in the commotion. The birthday detail is surgical — self-destruction scheduled on the day you're supposed to celebrate being alive. And notice where he falls: the ocean. If you've been reading this catalog with me, you know what water means by now. It's where he goes to disappear and where he goes to be reborn, sometimes in the same song. Come Back to Earth sinks into it. Self Care is oblivion's body of water. Swimming is the whole practice of staying on top of it. Here, in 2014, he falls in and just listens to the voices. And then: None of us are chosen, I forgive 'em for their ignorance, but / What's a man gotta do for a little bliss? (Fuck the future).

That parenthetical. Fuck the future — whispered, ad-libbed, thrown away like he hoped nobody would catch it. But the entire refrain is a claim about the future. The song contains its own rebuttal, and the rebuttal is delivered under the breath, the way true things often are.

And still the refrain comes back. The best is yet to come. After a birthday suicide, after the ocean, after fuck the future. The prayer wheel turns one more time.

The Chorus That Isn't a Chorus

Then the refrain finally breaks, and what replaces it is an interrogation:

What does death feel like? / What does, what does death feel like? Oh, oh my God.

Why does death steal life? ... Why does death steal light?

Watch the drift from "life" to "light." Life is what you have. Light is what you give off. The question darkens as it repeats — death doesn't just end you, it extinguishes what you illuminate. And the questions are asked like a kid asks them, the same way, over and over, getting no answer, until language gives out entirely and the outro is just oh my God stacked on oh my God, rough layers of a man running out of sentence.

This is the part that was recorded in one stream of consciousness. Of course it was. You can't write that section. You can only fall into it.

And here's the thing I can't get past, the thing that makes this song almost unbearable to hear in 2025 and beyond: he recorded this in 2014. Four years before. The question on the chorus got answered — not for us, never for us, but for him — and the song sat in a vault for a decade waiting to be released into a world where its central question has a terrible extra weight. The estate didn't change a note. They let the rough layers stand. The best is yet to come, sung by a man whose future ran out, on a track that ends one song before an album called Balloonerism closes with Tomorrow Will Never Know.

The Threads

That adjacency is not an accident, even if the sequencing was inherited. I've written about Tomorrow Will Never Know — the closer, the phone call that rings out into nothing, the wish that eats itself. Rick's Piano sits immediately before it, and the two tracks form an argument. Track 13 asserts the future: the best is yet to come. Track 14 dissolves it: tomorrow will never know. The mantra and the void, back to back, in that order. The album doesn't resolve the argument. It just places them next to each other and ends.

The refrain-as-coping mechanism has a family too. So It Goes borrows Vonnegut's death-refrain the same way this borrows a self-help mantra — a phrase repeated not because it consoles but because repetition is all there is. And the "her" of verse two, the girl who can't be comforted by him — she's the sister of the girl in Stoned, the one on the other side of the door, rolling up and breaking down. The Balloonerism girl keeps appearing, and Mac keeps failing to reach her, and he keeps admitting the failure is at least partly his.

What the Song Teaches

Here's my thesis, if I have to say it plain: "Rick's Piano" is not a hopeful song with dark verses, and it's not a dark song with a hopeful hook. It's a song about the maintenance of hope — hope as labor, as repetition, as discipline — recorded by a man sitting at the piano of the person he asked to save him, built out of a recording made while he waited to be received.

The knock-knock joke is the key. A knock-knock joke is a ritual of approach: you knock, someone has to say "who's there," the door opens. The punchline here is a piano — the instrument, not the man. Rick Rubin who? Rick Rubin's piano. What answers the door isn't the savior. It's the work. The man never arrives in the joke. The piano is what's there.

Maybe that's the whole summer at Shangri-La in one bad joke: you knock on the door of the person you think will fix you, and what's actually behind the door is an instrument, and you have to sit down and play it yourself.

Key Takeaways

• The refrain is a practice, not a belief. "The best is yet to come" returns unchanged against escalating despair — verse one is guarded, verse five is annihilation. Same words, shrinking faith. That's the sound of discipline, and it's why the refrain lands as heartbreaking instead of uplifting.
• "(Fuck the future)" is the thesis in a whisper. The song's only rebuttal to its own mantra is ad-libbed and buried. The truest line on the track is the one he hoped you'd miss.
• The phone recording is the point. Built from a rough chop of Mac alone at Rick Rubin's piano, never re-cut. The room tone of waiting-to-be-saved is the instrument.
• Life drifts to light. The closing interrogation — what does death feel like / why does death steal life / why does death steal light — darkens as it repeats, moving from existence to illumination.
• Track 13 and 14 are an argument. The mantra ("the best is yet to come") and the void ("tomorrow will never know") are sequenced back to back. The album doesn't resolve them. Neither did he.

Motif Tracker (Explication #167)

Motif	Appearance	Notes
Water / ocean	"I shot myself on my birthday, fell into the ocean"	The catalog's oldest deep-water image, mid-catalog: the ocean as the place you fall into to disappear and listen. Bridges Come Back to Earth's sinking and Swimming's treading. Here there's no stroke — he just listens to the voices.
Mantra / refrain-as-coping	"The best is yet to come" × 5	New motif. A phrase repeated against worsening evidence. Sibling of So It Goes's Vonnegut refrain — repetition as the only available response to death.
The future	"(Fuck the future)"	Inverted from Tomorrow Will Never Know's wishing-as-recursion: there the wish traps the wisher; here the future is cursed outright, in a parenthetical.
Death inquiry	"What does death feel like? / Why does death steal light?"	New motif. Death asked about directly, childlike, unanswered. Prefigures the Swimming/Circles-era questions but rawer — no arrangement cushioning it.
Hope kept in a drawer	"Spend her paycheck on that lingerie, she scared to put it on"	New motif. Hope purchased but never worn in front of anyone. Private belief, public doubt.
The damaged who can't receive	"Blind mice," "deaf father"	Whether the broken even want repair; whether love reaches a body that can't take it in.
Knock / door	Knock-knock intro	Approach ritual where the punchline is an instrument. Rhymes with Stoned's locked door — another room where the person inside doesn't open.
Birthdays / dates	"I shot myself on my birthday"	Self-destruction scheduled on the celebration of being alive. Watch for dates carrying double weight elsewhere.

Open QuestionJosh Berg said the ending was done in one stream of consciousness, layered roughly, and left that way. But the estate spent a decade deciding what to do with this record. When they finally released it, they kept the rough layers. Was that fidelity to the session, or is the roughness itself part of the message — a song about not being fixed being left, deliberately, unfixed? And if they'd polished it, would it still be true?