Winamp Wednesday: Liars in Love
Like a wave on the ocean...
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
The Hooters, "And We Danced"
Sure, I had plenty of Nervous Nights.
When you're fifteen and you have momentum it is very easy to believe in ever afters. Good things are happening to you and there are dreams that are so close you can taste them. That's when you--or at least I--gravitate towards music that could serve as that great soundtrack to the perpetual third act that is a developing life.
Like most of my early Winamp choices, "And We Danced" had drowned in its own cheese long ago and was only sightly redeemed in its reputation by burgeoning 80s nostalgia. The structure of it all is so shopworn that there was no way the song wasn't going to be a hit, dragging both the novel and the tired together to make sure we all had something to grab ahold. It starts with a gimmick, that combination of melodica and mandolin that sounded like nothing else on the radio in a several-year blast radius. There's your hook, that's what will keep bringing people back and making them think that maybe they like the song more than they do.
The bulk of the song is filtered Springsteen and that specific kind of treble assault we think of when we think of 1986. Most of the lyrics are "Night Moves" as rewritten by a half-clever teenager, the sort of stuff that most likely adorns my notebooks buried deep in a closet at my folks' place. I don't know what the hell "a bebop baby on a Hard Day's Night" is and I don't know that The Hooters do either. "And We Danced" is a Rorschach Test for a rambunctious and longing teenager, full of oblique images and promises that romance is around every corner and that your life is ready to explode out with whatever it is that you desire.
The guys who wrote this also co-wrote both Joan Osbourne's "One of Us" and Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time", meaning that they always traded in the catchy as hell but usually got more specific and cutting with their words.
But the slight and rickety parts of this song didn't matter to me. It was springtime and I was fifteen and New York City was my personal dance floor. The triumphs of a high-school kid are minuscule in context of the larger world and obviously intensely personal: a part in the school play, a date with a girl who seems too impossibly great to exist, maybe convincing your parents to let you have a computer in your room. Even hearing the right song in the wild feels like winning the lottery. Those little surges of electric endorphins. It is so great to be alive and this world will give us beautiful things if we let it. Thank God that I get to live into the 21st Century.
It was a dumb and naive way to live, but I didn't know any other option. I was so glad to celebrate every little victory. "Are we getting too close? Do we dare to get closer?" The song asked and I always answered yes, get me as close to the weird and wonderful ways my life was evolving, like afterburners pushing me on my trajectory. The right song doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be the right song.
That melodica riff returns after the bridge and the solo, a look in the mirror to tell us that we've been on a journey and that our time is short. You can always hit repeat on a hit song--and I probably heard this one somewhere in the triple digits in that fateful April--but you can't repeat any part of your life, not exactly. "The trouble with time is it don't go back", but that's for a future Winamp Wednesday. No wonder so many bands write vague songs about being a joyous teenager. It's too difficult to remember the specifics.
Sometimes I feel like I can almost grasp who that kid was when every day was its own little story and each one had the perfect song to go with it. Every one of us is an archeologist trying to unearth ourselves from sadness and bitter disappointments and the curse of lost memories. But sometimes when the room is spinning...