But I'd be all right

I saw a heart in a cold, cold west-east moving cloud tonight. A message. An answer. 

It must have dissipated before it reached the lake. 

But I saw it.

So take me where the tide lines will find me

What happens when you've found what you were looking for and don't know what you're looking for next, haven't known for a while? When there are too many other things [feelings] pushing onto your train of thought, in a hurry, gotta get to work/play/vengeance/threat/flight/lovin'touchin'squeezin' another/Jewel?

Just keep stepping outside, I guess.

This is your chance to believe

Twenty-three and some change years ago, I stood in the center room in your apartment on Grand and scanned the tall shelves of cds while you showered. You'd put on disc--pretty sure it was a disc, I don't remember there being a turntable--of Gaucho. Maybe we'd recently been at that party in the Gold Coast (the one thrown by the woman who'd openly flirt with you the first of multiple times that night and, eventually, convince you--as if it was a hard choice--to date her) where on the way, you and I and Fuller walked past some middle-aged dudes and you both stopped dead in your tracks and shouted in unison at each other: "Steely DAN!!" Maybe it was not long after that, so you played it, probably for my edification. Thanks. I mean that, thanks, this was as valuable--no, more, than the discs of Neil Young's Decade you burned for me.

Midsummer early evening sun slanted onto the dirty carpet in that room while this track played. I was frozen, by it, in it, for it. I was asked by it, can you remember this moment, later? 

I'm in the kitchen of my apartment, now, and it just played on the radio we leave on to keep the cat company. (It really gives us more comfort than she.) I can go into the middle room in this apartment and look at other tall shelves of other cds. I've travelled to come back to the same place. Seven miles, more than three times that in years, a couple of Steely Dan concerts, and inumerable listens to Gaucho (most of them in Southern California).

I never got the chance to ask you to burn that one for me.

Five-minute write: Can't find a way back home any more

This is my hand clawing onto dock, I'm desperate to pull myself out of the water and up on to the hard surface that's real, feels real, is real underneath my bent body. But this unibody aluminum clamshell has got its one or two teeth in me, pulling me to do one or two more things in/on it. Just one more! It's only...oh, crap, sorry, now it's 9:00 and you're still working and you don't need to hide from highly perturbed and uncertain world out there, and phone notifications, and random thoughts (am I dying? what is the age difference between Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas, anyway?) any more.

I can do this. I can get up here, if only because I can hear this coming out of a radio somewhere. Not out of this computer (okay, yes, really, but I need to keep this scenario going).

If anything can pull me out of this, it's this pair of "California v888na sailors".  The wise man has the power, after all.

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.'" 

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.

And you don't come from this town

After five days under the big sky a mile high, fuzzy-headed and languid, this is the perfect fit, just as it was in the humid Kentucky summer in '89, when I was finally fully driving, working full-time at TJ Maxx and figuring out how to continue to live in the liberation I had during that first year of college while staying in my old room back at home. How odd to return to childhood in your last teenage year when you'd gone where you wanted when you wanted, and if you didn't go where you needed when you should have, you and you alone paid the consequences. 

At least I had the freedom of a car. Did they finally have two cars then? Must have, because I was able to take the matte-blue Toyota out at night, to work, to where I needed (and sometimes wanted) to go. I have a distinct memory of sitting at the light on Waller Avenue at Broadway, an intersection where both streets turn into other-named streets, Waller becoming Mason-Headley Road and Broadway becoming Harrodsburg Road. This must have evolved from the junction being the legal boundary of town at some point, where city streets became country roads named either after people or their farms, or the destination/terminus, where a managed thoroughfare, a part of a whole, abruptly ended and became a country highway. 

Anyway: I'm at this light, and this song is on the radio. And I'm sitting there, late in the night, waiting at a red light where the green-lit street is empty, no traffic, where, decades before, what was controlled became free. And I'm noticing that key change in guitar in the song's "doo-doodoo, doo-doo" outro, and I feel...my age. Grown. Living on the highway, not the street.

You're all that's left to hold on to

When I purchased a cassette of The Joshua Tree in November 1987 and for years--decades--of listening thereafter, I barely paid attention to side two of the album. It wasn't until a drive across West Virginia and Virginia (possibly with my sister) in the mid- to late 2000s that JT was put on and, somehow, the sounds of side two--"One Tree Hill," "In God's Country," and especially this one--merged with the ribbon of highway unspooling through the Applachian Hills. 

No wonder it sounds like a landscape: the album was inspired by their views of America, good, bad, ugly. Apparently, though, this track was such a disappointment for the band that they remixed 30 years later with some restored horn-y-sounding synths and re-recorded vocals by an older Bono.

Oh, no. This sounds flat, shiny--and with treated vocals?! Come on! Oh, I'm going to pretend I never heard this. Bono, guys, you didn't need to go back to fix something that was real, human, not tech-manipulated, but more importantly, the choices of your younger selves. 

Maybe that's why I tear up when I hear it--inexplicably, since the source material is really pretty far removed from life today. Maybe it's how I felt about Bono back then, having a poster (not this one, but like it) on my dorm room wall freshman year, my Bono For President campaign of one, how distinctly I remember the start of the Joshua Tree tour stop at Rupp Arena (23rd October 34 years ago) when I could see him emerge in the dimness from the side of the stage during the long wind-up of "Where the Streets Have No Name." I can go see him and him alone now, on a smaller stage, for a small fortune.

But, I don't want to see my hero now. I want to hear him then.

Some day we will both look back and have to laugh

I can't believe I haven't written about this one yet, but BJ's not really been in my daily orbit for a long time. Also not considered in a long time: my junior prom, for which this was the theme (song). "This Is the Time" was the theme song because it was not the students' choice by vote, "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)." Never forget: though my high school was close to the center of the horsey-preppy universe (the actual center being Sayre), we were (mostly) pretty damn cool kids. Not saying that we were Shermer High-caliber or teenage Beastie Boys- hanging-at-Danceteria cool, but this is more than I'd expect based on the high school experiences of friends who grew up in bigger, hipper places than Lexington, Kentucky.

The voting results were scuttled and the school leadership or whichever faculty worked with the prom committee provided this alternative: a mid-chart-peaking hit (that hit some five months before prom) from a guy closer to our parents' age that was destined to emanate from office desk radios tuned to lite-FM stations for years to come. 

I remember snippets of prom day/night, from the picking-up-photo-session that in the background featured my dad in a tie with his Saturday lawn-mowing clothes, dinner at the restaurant owned by my great-uncle, so everyone in my family was up in the business of this, sheer exhaustion at the end of the night (I was allowed to stay out until 1:00? Probably 1:00, surely not 2:00). The event itself, eh, proceeded like the usual dances at my high school--in fancy clothes. 

What's clearest (aside from my awesome black lace-and-taffeta, sweetheart neckline, tea-length dress custom made by my mother) is the moment worthy of the biggest screech of the needle across the jukebox record in human history: when the band playing prom, Velvet Elvis (major score to host a true indie rock band mere months before they got a label deal), stopped playing whatever song they were playing so that Billy's mellow synth chords and meditation on middle-aged love could blare over the crinolined and tux'ed crowd. 

But, damn it all, this was the right song choice. 

I know it now, because, this is, perpetually, the time.

Wouldn't it be good if we could live without a care?

This one never got its due. It didn't break the Top 40, and was not included in the Pretty in Pink soundtrack, instead covered by Danny Hutton Hitters--a lame-ass move as inexplicable as the changed ending. Roughly ten years earlier, Hutton crooned "Black and White" when he was in Three Dog Night. It's a long way from consciousness-raising cowbell to synth squiggles. 

Obviously, the original is the superior version, and Nik got to perform it at Live Aid . I distinctly remember seeing this part of the concert. How goddamn incredible that was, to watch all of my heroes ally day long. Including, hero though he wasn't at that time, Phil Collins on two continents!

It has such an angular and "aggressive"--and, yes, alien--sound for a longing and introspective song.

Whatever the form, it's just right for now, for figuring out where to go now that there feels like there's spaciousness, and the here where you have been is turning into someplace else. 

Evolution time

New talisman from a 30 year-old experience. I never really did hear all of the lyrics clearly, and I didn't pay attention when I sent off to Grand Royal for a lyric sheet. 

That's okay, "I don't see things quite the same as I used to..." And I can paste them here for posterity. 

Stand Together

I don't see things quite the same as I used to
As I live my life, I've got just me to be true to
When I find that I don't know about just what to do
I turn and look within to see what I should do
Now I'm not sure what it takes to be hip
A lot of people making music that to be ain't shit
So I ask creation for rhymes for this jam
Gimme lickle solo and I'll take the mic stand

Love vibe, love vibe, love vibe, love vibe
Love vibe, love vibe, love vibe, love vibe

Yeah, as the earth spins into a brand new day
I see the light on the horizon's not fading away
Gonna shine from within, like a bright white sun
No need to hide and no place to run
Got the vibrations of the music bringing light to your mind
So you can move and groove, and feel the beat of the time
Sense the power in the air as it starts to move
You get a real good feeling that you just can't lose

Love vibe
Contemplation time
Love vibe
Intuition time
Love vibe
Evolution time
Love vibe
Resolution time

Free your mind, it's time for good times
And let yourself move, it's a time to shine
Spread your wings in the sky, feelin' good inside
Breaking fool with no need to hide
I got the music cuttin' through me
Takin' control of my soul
I can't hold back, I've got to let go

Stand together (people come together now)
It's about time (we've got to get together now)
Stand together (people come together now)
I said it's about time (we've got to get together now), come on
Stand together (people come together now)
I said it's about time (we've got to get together, y'all) 

I think we should stand together