The first several times I heard this song, I thought it was boring. Most people I make listen to it, and over the years that’s been a lot, think it’s boring. It’s not boring. It’s a play.
Don’t give me that need for instant gratification. It’s a 4 minute song. You were going to spend it on facebook.
We are so slow, in this song. It’s just a rhythmic feature: My friend assures me…bad um bum…it’s all or nothing…bad um bum…From the beginning, we ask too many questions. There’s a girl, and the situation isn’t right. Our friends ask, what do we feel. We know we feel. We are not worried, we are not overly concerned. There are things I can do. I’ll make her happy enough, she’ll get another vacation out of it. All of these things are lies and slowly disintegrate. The rhythmic feature exists unadorned so you can listen to the voice. The voice gives you everything you need, sailing with a kind of resigned desperation through a series of points retreated from. I say “it doesn’t bother me to say it isn’t love”, because it does, because it does, who would think to say such a thing otherwise. Does it come up in casual conversation? Is it small talk? It’s in there “you try to tell yourself the things you try to tell yourself to make yourself forget”.
These things are “I am not worried. It doesn’t bother me to say it isn’t love. Because if you don’t want to talk about it—why don’t you want to talk about it? Is the problem me?” Love comes untimely, inconveniently, it would be better if it didn’t, say it didn’t. But it does. We hit the chorus. It takes two full verses to get to the chorus, that’s why this song is boring. Two full verses, with two bridges. These seconds when I’m shaking leave me shuddering for days, she says, yes, because it is there, inconveniently, and it will out.
Finally this chorus. The guitar jumps in, triumphantly, a little piano in it. A hopeful repetition of driving notes, and something under. Play with pronouns—she starts to change her mind. Who’s the pursuer and who the reluctant pursued here? Is she ready, and I am not, and now she’s not so sure? Why does that change anything for me? But it does. I’m just washed away, and all the things I’ve thought and said. I’m just… But. It’s pulled away. Instantly the chorus disappears, like it was never there. The rhythmic feature. I’m not going to break. I’m not going to bend. It doesn’t change anything. I’ll just forget about her, I’ll put her down in the album, these strange and beautiful butterflies who I did not keep but framed. That will be enough.
But I can’t sleep.
And we boom into the chorus. Really, this time. All of it, and complete surrender. Every time she sneezes, I know I’m wrong. I hear her murmuring, as we sleep—I can’t sleep, we can sleep—and I know I’m wrong. Now it’s my mind that begins to change, pronoun shift. I’m not ready for this sort of thing, but that’s not an objection, that’s the facts. Never are. The background jumps in “Rain falls down, Rain falls down”, and I soar over it. Time. I understand. I understand. I’m not ready. Doesn’t matter. Chased away, and washed away, reminded unpleasantly that planning dissolves and inconvenience happens, ready to embrace it.
It disappears like a whisper. She disappears.