I'm on the line, one open mind

How did I not know that number XX on the list of my All-Time Favorite Songs (Not Just the Ones By Tears for Fears) was released on my birthday? Here is a system of touch!

Speaking of that lyric, I love that Roland and the actor in the video are so genuinely awkward. They are like two teens in a John Hughes movie. 

I've been longing to write, and didn't know it was going to be about this since I decided to prattle on about whatever Sirius New Wave threw at me upon turning it on this evening. And, lo, there this was. Whether true synchronicity, or Jukebox Fate, or the luck of the dial (programming), I'm all in on this. 

Except what is there to say? Only, cryptically, that this represents, as it felt like in '85 when released, being in the middle of a change that now feels like it's finally gonna come. This track's deep-throated drums and liberal application of phasers feel like the advent of something. Not that Advent that is the rehash of every year, and that asks you to rebelieve the same story each time. No, something actually different and new. What is it? I'll never find out til I'm head over...

The general synopsis at one-eight-double-o

I wish to drift in the day the way that this sounds. For TFF, this was a snippet, a throwaway experiment, a b-side with the instrumentation of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" with a recording of British Isles' daily Shipping Forecast.

How comforting it sounds, an almost lyrical recitation of the weather on the faraway seas, intoned four times daily! A schedule, a structure, some wrangling of the uncontrollable. Speaking about the roiling ocean, but not from it, or upon it, or affected by it. Instead, issuing warnings, forecasts, affixing words and numbers to the wind and water.

Maybe Roland added this in the spirit of experimentation, making no connection to the song or its progenitor. 

But I'm glad to discover this odd and wonderful ritual, and feel its comfort while I seek to move to different sea areas.

I can't go on, holding on to time

All it takes is a maudlin "love theme from" soundtrack song to shoot me back to not the feeling that it first prompted, but nostalgia for that feeling. 

Or, maybe it's feeling the gap where my longing little heart once was. What is there to long for now, except the longing back then? 

It's funny: the words that are embroidered all over this feeling, that I keep hearing, are ones introduced to me at the start of this era, in first semester freshman English (which, I discovered, you can procure on a welcome mat).

This could be the biggest sky

(How do I write this without any working jargon? No "aligns" or "frameworks" or "meet?")

In the absence of feelings about the time this song emerged, or about its content (this is SUCH A WORK EMAIL RIGHT NOW), I am going to pull myself out of dutiful, scheduled, timebound thinking by wondering about the genesis of it.

Here it is, a snapshot about him, and his reminder to me that you can be both deliberate and spontaneous in your creating.  

That structure will set you free. 

That I admire the freedom of improvising, and understand viscerally how that freedom happens because improvising, though improvising, still has a...framework. 

Time will wear away the stone

... one day that's plagued by neck/head/nose aches, has blood drawn during it, and features internet searches for things like theracanes (look it up) and three-figure side-sleeper pillows. While shedding these dollar bills, I feel my shoulderblades pinched up and together, and if I could just loosen these guys after what could be a full life lived in front of a computer.

Not something I pictured in 85, starting a new school year while pledging to follow HoJo's plain and placid advice.

HoJo was the zen-mind infiltrator of a dross-filled (even though I love it all) few pop and rock years, held down-list by the only song that could mass-market possibly the worst movie (I have) ever (seen). Take it from someone who also has recently seen The Secret of My Success.

HoJo has brought me back from brinks of flat-out despair to full-blown freak more than one time. Do thy work again, soothe my aching head.

You can almost hear time slipping away

No memory associated with this one, though in February of 85, it would have been a cool older brother of this song, less dissonant, though, and not as troubling since Arcadia signaled trouble in DD paradise. 

Also, you didn't hear me say this, but Peter Cox might just have a naturally "better" voice than Simon. Though GW certainly didn't nab a Grace Jones vocal bridge.

Maybe this is something I should scrutinize. Might as well, since I am all about rabbit, mouse, mole, and info-infinity holes these days at the expense of all else.

To stop the truth from hurting you

This one hypnotized me in the fall of 85. 

I have this exact 12-inch, and based on when I bought it, where I bought it (most assuredly Record Bar in Turfland Mall), and where it’s from (UK import), I probably spent a lot of allowance on it. I had to be deliberate in my purchases before that next summer, when I was earning my own money, after having trudged back to the mall not to shop but to find a job, which, luckily, was within 100 feet of Record Bar.

Then, inexplicably, I heard it again while sitting in the hair salon chair, probably delivered to someone’s phone app by an algorithm seeking synthy 80s. 

But algorithms can’t identify the juxtaposition of word and sound that sounds like the longing you had at the same time as leaves whipped off of trees outside of your window while you were supposed to be doing homework.

I've invested too much time to give you up that easy

I wish it was February 1985 instead of February 2021, because then we'd all be looking at MTV and Space Shuttle launches and returns, and wondering "Where's the beef?" instead of preening and pissing on the internet constantly. Which is what I am doing right now, but that's not important right now. 

I'm sure I'd feel much lighter and connected--to physical things, like papers, pens, desks carved by dozens of bored teenage hands, mildewy girls' restroom corners, cig smoke undulating out of the Faculty Lounge (and sometimes the girls' restroom corners), mimeographed exams, formaldehyde in the bio classroom, Giorgio Beverly Hills and Drakkar Noir drifting down the halls. Or like cold, glassy tv screens, permanently leaden November-March Kentucky skies, the pops of color in everyone's clothes, pops of their collars, the nubby acrylic of my sweaters from McAlpins or Jean Nicole or Deb (did I shop there?), a needle on a record, pencil lead dust on the edge of a ruler after making one third of an isosceles triangle. Baked potatoes and Pop Tarts.  The wondrous web of hair spray in another girl's curls.

My heart lurching under my Oxford-cloth button down and sweater when I saw him down the hall.  

All else are castles built in the air

I've been listening to this playlist because 1984 is, of course, the Best Year. These spins ease into 1985, too, but I don't mind that. After all, the early months of year was a continuation of '84 musically--Purple Rain, Born in the USA, and Wham! are represented--and in that we were still wearing natural fabrics and Madonna-inspired flounce and flash (and rubber bracelets), with the neon, knit, and cut-outs of the latter months not having taken hold.

Where was I?

This song.



I like this song because of its similarity in tempo and atmosphere to her bigger, and, of course, Best Year hit . It doesn't quite fit the movie, but it fits Tina's ca 1984-85 zeitgeist.

And, duh, the same dudes wrote it.

Someday I'll figure out why those 18-24 months hit so hard, then and now.

I wrapped it up and sent it

Dream of the Eighties.

And I always wanted my hair to look like Andrew's girlfriend-who-took-George's-heart-last-Christmas' hair.



I love this song, which has become a refreshingly grim fixture in the Yuletide tune canon, but not this much.

Just for one day

I remember.



I think. Actually, I remember all of this:



It's funny, though. That means almost nothing to me now.

And Bowie is...everything. Sharp, on target, on message, unifying, electrifying. And I didn't realize that until I saw it (again?) within the mesmerizing final room of the MCA show.

Also of note within these two: the Union of the Huge High-Low Backup Singer Shirts.

But this... sheer raise-funds, festival-busting perfection. Set the standard, really. And prepped me for dorm-room poster-level worship just a few years later, shifting from multiple, be-makeuped mullets to just...one love.



Still, Bowie wins. I mean:

Time got excited

Speaking of album openers (even though we weren't), the single drumbeat that kicks (ha) off the title track to the album that includes the hugely synthy and thrilling "Alive and Kicking" is ... I don't know what it is. It just works for me today.



It's also how the Minds' biggest--not greatest--Stateside hit starts. And they didn't even write it, though it was written with them in mind (ha).

[Ed. Note: listen to the demo embedded in the Spin article and tell me they weren't actually aiming for the Psych Furs and Richard Butler and not the Minds]

I was precisely in the target demographic, so, yeah, it worked. Consider me obsessed, and I probably viewed it not long after the 2/15/85 opening, and hit up The Record Bar straight after.

I also don't know if I'd agree with the subtitle "Poor Man's U2" for the band. Yes, they made epic, sweeping use-a-thesaurus-here songs, but these sprang, in my estimation, from straight from the heart ("I'd be with you/I dreaaaaam about you...I stay with you...tonight"), less filtered through the head. And embroidered with the keys and piano of Michael MacNeil, which don't cross between actual human hands plunking keys and chirps emitting from the turning of knobs. SM are synthy, but not Depeche Mode, for god's sake.

I'm glad The Breakfast Club pushed the Minds onto our shores, our record players, tape decks and for god's sake, into our minds.

The notes don't seem three decades old, though. Not at all.