The Daily Feather — The Waiting

“Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.”

Marcel Marceau

Songs that come together piece by piece truly fit the description of Thursday’s Bloomberg quote of the day. Tom Petty’s 1981 hit “The Waiting” was one of those songs. The late rocker recalled in 2014: “I remember writing that one very well. That was a hard one, went on for weeks. I got the chorus right away, and I had that guitar riff, that really good lick—couldn’t get anything else. I had a really hard time. And I knew it was good, and it just went on endlessly. It was one of those where I really worked on it until I was too tired to go any longer. And I’d get right up and start again and spend the whole day to the point where other people in the house would complain.” The tune peaked at No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped Rock Tracks chart for six straight weeks in the summer of 1981.

Listen to it once and you’ll agree the chorus is timeless, especially the last line: “The waiting is the hardest part.” It seems that every Thursday morning, this verse plays over and over in our collective minds at QI. Weekly initial jobless claims have been trapped in a range between 200,000 and 260,000 (give or take) since Halloween of 2021. Waiting for the layoff cycle to break above this range has been the hardest part for macro bears who’ve long since sniffed out a turn in the labor cycle.