Five-minute write: Nothing takes the past away like the future

Not far from where I'd bike home, heading west on Kinzie, past the produce warehouses and distributors who'd finished for the day, some of the vegetables languishing in the gutter, no one really driving past me, no one interrupting my ride, my thoughts, I heard, live, for the first time, some of the songs that beat my feet into the pedals in the summers of 2001-2003. I was in as much of a trance as I'd have been on a dancefloor, except the ray of light was high summer sun of rush hour sluicing through the West Loop grid. I'd pedal, and feel, and dream, and feel some more. And, somehow know that something else was out there for me. 

If that's not what she sings about in just about every song, and what this concert was about, then I don't know  what matters, really.

No, don't disappear

Sometimes you need a bit of pop sparkle when hard winter is descending and punitive and you need to be pulled out of a stretch of daily mundane chaos and, well, it's just dark all the damn time.

Kind of like ABC adding two non-musical "performers" to their line-up in 84-85 for the How to Be a...Zillionaire! album, a journalist and a--well, musician, actually. But David Yarritu only pretended to play an instrument during performances and spoke on the tracks, making an immortal declaration on this track's B-side "A to Z," something we'd repeat endlessly in the multi-color spring of '85.

Spring will come here again, too. I'll take this taste for now.

Well, I don't remember all I know

This debuted on the Hot 100 exactly 41 years ago. How is that even possi It's a fact. Let's leave it at that.

Having never put the line break in the right place in the lyrics, I always thought Martha was singing "Well, I don't remember all I know...but it makes me feel good now." 

It's a fact. You're the boat against the current of your memory, borne back ceaselessly (this can't be the first instance that I've quoted TGG; I don't care). Or, your memory is the boat, you're the current, and-- Muh, this metaphor.

The fact is that you've got to be a bit trapped between the walls of something to push out and make something. Even when the walls are familar and limn your comfort and safetey that you don't need any more.

The first poke of your nose outside of them can even be a rehash. Hell, Russell Mulcahy even recycled a table flip from this track's video in "Hungry Like the Wolf."

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...

…if you want it.

Really, it is so, if you want. 

Five minutes or less: I couldn't think of what to say

Oh, the languorousness of this first single off the fifth, overall kinda meh TT album! Up to the incongruous DD-style bridge--no wonder, as with "The Reflex," Alex Sadkin produced the album/track, which Nile Rodgers came in and zhuzhed (Chic-ed?) up--it's delightful. Unlike "Doctor! Doctor!," which, when played on the radio, I would gaze up at my DD poster hung in the angled ceiling of my closet, this track was reserved for thinking about 3D humans that you'd see putting books into lockers and kicking soccer balls. The songs, Irish twins released only 11 months apart in the same year, illustrate the difference between a teen in 8th grade (and at the end of 8 long years in the same grade school) and a teen in high school. Still moony-eyed when expensive synths play exotic sounds, but with different objects of the gaze.

I was in a terrible mood today ("life seems much too long," etc.) up until (sidestepping the obvious puns) I heard this track. 

Five minutes or less: Some things will never change

Can I write a post in five minutes or less? Sure, if it's something I've heard on the radio an untold number of times, lyrics I can decipher, and that makes me feel a modicum of emotion or memory. Can inequity be addressed in a pop song? Sure, give it to rootsy-meets-Billy-Joel-future-Dead-hired-hand Bruce Hornsby (and the Range--I forgot he had a band!). 

Would an office worker ca. 1987 pause their word processing, look into the middle distance, over the shoulder holder on their phone receiver, and think about the d*ck in the silk suit, and the larger issue at hand? Maybe.

Take you far from this place and time

Today in Soft Rock Saved Me:

In what feels like the 99th hour today and yesterday of wrangling the mundane and the wild mind, this came on SiriusXM and suddenly I floated away to a white coastal house ringed by a wide porch, palms spiking and lazy trees swaying around it, the air heavy and sweet. And I look down and see my tan chest and shoulders under a white cargo top...no, a boatneck, filmy...oh, hell, it doesn't matter because I am finally in a moment that makes all the bland and monkey-minded time worthwhile, I have no worries, I have no cares, I don't have to check email, any email, I can feel the sun.

This mirage is all I have since the sun won't be back for another 120 days, really...

Could it really, really be?

Oh, you sing of love and longing, the joy and the helplessness of it, better than anyone. That sweet, easy voice--stronger and more primal than actual memory, woven into my childhood mind and heart, even if it was coming out of a tinny Toyota radio.

And then, when I grew up, and loved and longed for "sweet----wonderful you" with "your mood...like a circus wheel, changing all the time" while "waiting for the sun to come up," the words and the tone and the feeling merged and I understood what you were doing more deeply.

These Tusk songs mean more to me than the formative stuff on WLAP when I was a kid, somehow. Maybe because they are (relatively) new discoveries, made in adulthood. And "Songbird" is too unearthly to even hear outside of life events.

Somehow, because I didn't hear her singing these out of the car radio or from vintage vinyl of their perfect, signature album, the songs are mine, to me, for me, from her.

Wonder why you haven't before

I used to loathe this song. Not so much the song itself, but what it stood for, of course. The end of opaque R.E.M., cool (whatever that meant to you) R.E.M., blah blah. Now I know it was self-admittedly "stupid" and that it passes the float test for me right now: "Singer Michael Stipe has said of the song's meaning, 'It's about making decisions and actually living your life rather than letting it happen.'"