Why Stephen Colbert Closed His Final Show With "Holland, 1945"
After the star-studded "We'll Meet Again" singalong and the sleigh ride into eternity with Santa, the Colbert Report rolled credits for the final time with Neutral Milk Hotel's "Holland, 1945" playing in the background. It may have seemed a strange choice, but it's one with personal significance to Stephen Colbert.
The kicker to Maureen Dowd's Colbert tribute column, of all things, explains why he chose to end his extremely upbeat finale with a tragic number featuring allusions to Anne Frank and World War II:
He had 10 older siblings. But after his father and the two brothers closest to him in age died in a plane crash when he was 10 and the older kids went off to college, he said, he was "pretty much left to himself, with a lot of books."
He said he loved the "strange, sad poetry" of a song called "Holland 1945" by an indie band from Athens, Ga., called Neutral Milk Hotel and sent me the lyrics, which included this heartbreaking bit:
"But now we must pick up every piece
Of the life we used to love
Just to keep ourselves
At least enough to carry on. . . .
And here is the room where your brothers were born
Indentions in the sheets
Where their bodies once moved but don't move anymore."
It's as heartbreaking as "We'll Meet Again" was uplifting, but he couldn't have picked a more artful way to close this biggest chapter in his career so far with a nod to the people who couldn't be there to see it.
