They're Ready to Go Now...

I think to myself...

The French girl sighs.

And you think French girls always sigh.

But not this one.

This one keeps her sighs internal. She hides them, doling them out only late at night, when no one is around.

She catches herself, looks around to make sure no one saw.

You bury yourself in the book, not wanting to reveal yourself. Not thinking the time is right.

But the French girl knows something is different. She can sense a ripple in the warmth from a thousand yards. She knows when things will happen before they do.

And she sees things. Things no one else can see.

Well, almost no one.

And you smile to yourself, knowing you can see these things too. Not all the time, maybe not even most of the time. But you see them.

Your mind fast-forwards decades and you wonder what she'll be like when she's old. Will she slip up then and let the sighs be heard? Will her grey hair still shimmer in the sunlight? Will she remember all those years earlier that you were behind her in the coffee shop, that you noticed her, smelled her shampoo, and dreamed of Paris.

Will she figure out how you realized she was French or will it remain forever a mystery?

You catch yourself daydreaming. And you scold yourself. You shouldn't be so lost in your imagination.

Or should you? Isn't that where she is? Lost in your imagination?

Or maybe lost in her own imagination. Eating quietly. Observing carefully. Thinking deeply.

And you think to yourself that you should go.

So you gather your belongings and you get up.

And there she is. As if by magic.

The French girl stands right next to you.

And she slowly starts to smile.

And you think to yourself of dark sacred nights. And smile back

Where That Place Used To Be

You know it's not there anymore, right?

Hang around anywhere long enough and you start giving directions that refer to things that aren't there anymore.

This is particularly bad in Los Angeles.

I still give directions that refer to landmarks that shut down 12 years ago.

Which is helpful to those who have a history here.

But more and more we don't.

When I went back to my hometown, I did the "what-used-to-be tour."

And wondered if the kids growing up now will have the same sense of nostalgia about the shit that's there now.

Probably.

Foolish Things

Now all I need is a hill...

Everything

Just a song for early Friday morning

Peter Pan Complex

Not Me

Darkness.

Huge lights blinking on and off.

The bass thumping through a wall of speakers.

You survey the room. Wonder what you're doing here. Wonder if you should leave.

When you spot her. Across the room.


She smiles at you. And you smile back.

Then you fly forward through the years.

Without talking or touching, you see the history, looking back from the future.

You see the highs and lows.

The heartache and the lost hours wondering.

You slowly walk towards her.


She waits for you to speak.

You spin through a list of things to say. None of them seem adequate. None seem important.

And you don't talk.

You do something stupid. Some foolish gesture with your hands and your head.

And you wait as she looks you over. Eternity spans the silence.

And then she smiles. You're immature. But so is she.

And you're both young, so neither of you minds.

It won't always be this way. You both know this.

But for now, it's enough.

March ReRun: Fooling with the Logarithms

Fooling with the Logarithms, Going Berzerk

[First posted back in November 2009]

We could hardly have been more different.

I was nerdy and obsessed with music, looking for escape and lost in my imagination. She was tough and sexy and careless.

I don't know how it started or why. She called me one night and told me she was getting high and blowing the smoke out her window. (To this day, I'm not sure why she told me that.)

I told her I was listening to the radio and reading Dostoyevsky. (I told her that because it was true.)

The outlines are blurred now, but some details are clearer than ever. During the first snowfall of the year, in front of the candy store whose owner would soon be arrested for selling drugs, she told me she wanted to run her own hair and nail salon and change her name to Jewelie. I wanted to keep from laughing when she mentioned that.


Before the internet, before MTV, before MP3s, people used to listen to the radio.

And briefly, in the late 70s, a band called The Sports sneaked onto the radio in the U.S. They sounded like a smoother version of Joe Jackson or Graham Parker. I didn't know at the time they were from Australia -- they sounded like dozens of other bands being packaged as "new wave."

But they'd figured out a sure-fire way to get radio play. They wrote a song about radio. It was one of the oldest gimmicks in music (but also one of the more effective ones). Then they took the gimmick up a notch and recorded dozens of customized versions of their radio-centric song, replacing the second "the radio" from the chorus with call letters of radio stations in the top media markets. The stations who were name-checked couldn't wait to play the song (and sometimes edited the call-letter shout-out to use in station-identification spots.

Ironically, I'd heard the "normal" version of this song on the cool radio station near where I lived. Months later, the more top-40 oriented station (which wasn't nearly as cool) started playing the "special" version of the song and I wondered if the band knew how uncool that other station was. (Probably not -- they were in Australia.)


My relationship with "Jewelie" didn't last long. We had little in common and she was always picking fights with me.

She drove an ancient beige Buick covered with rust spots and filled with fast-food wrappers. The tires were bald and the brakes squealed and she always drove too fast. The radio in the car was broken and she'd never bothered to get it fixed. The rust and tires and brakes I could understand, but not fixing the radio was a complete mystery to me.

A few weeks after that first snowfall, a heatwave settled into New England, turning the white ground cover slushy and gray until it disappeared altogether. It got cold again, but didn't snow for a while. And sometime in those cold days of waiting for more snow, "Jewelie" called me because she was mad that I didn't have any friends in prison. She yelled at me and dumped me over the phone, then complained that I had the radio on in the background. The station was playing the Sports at the very moment when she asked me "who listens to the radio anyway?"

Me. And everyone I knew.

But not her.

Our other problems would have been difficult to solve... but that one was impossible.

March Rerun: The Last 30 Seconds

The Top 10 Reasons Why the Last 30 Seconds of "Radio Bar" by Fountains of Wayne Capture Everything That's Good & Smart & Hopeful About Pop Music

[Originally posted last October -- crazy busy around these parts, so forgive the rerun]

First click here to listen.

10. "One night there was a girl there."
Probably there were girls there before that night. Maybe that girl was there on some previous night. But all good pop songs begin with a girl (and in the logic of the pop song, time begins anew when a girl appears).

9. "For some reason, she..."
Girls are strange and wondrous creatures. Men and boys will never understand them... We know that they have reasons for what they do, even if we'll never know or fully comprehend those reasons.

8. The way the horn parts echo and complement the vocals in the last verse.
Yeah, this technically starts before the last 30 seconds, but it continues and intensifies as the song draws to a close.

7. Stretching out the first syllable of "somewhere" in the line "She said 'why don't we go somewhere?'"
It would scan better not to stretch the syllable. It would match what went before. But when your entire life changes, everything suddenly seems different and when you look back, the moment of change elongates in your memory.

6. The internal rhyme of "So I passed her her coat, that was all that she wrote."
Again, when your entire life changes, the rhymes can quicken. And once your life changes completely, what's the harm of adding an extra line or two to the verse?

5. "That was it for the radio bar."
Because when your life suddenly changes and you have purpose, you no longer need to waste time childishly like you did before.

4. The false ending.
Is there anything sweeter than a fake ending in a power pop song? (Please reference "No Matter What" in your answer.) The only thing that would have made this better would be a split-second of complete silence before the drums kick back in.

3. The joyful continuation of the song.
Because even though the days of the Radio Bar are over, that doesn't mean you can't slam into the chorus one more time with all the gusto that encompassed every second you'd spent there over the years.

2. The percussion in the last chorus.
Similar, but much more pronounced than what went before. Listen carefully and you can hear a prominent triangle.

1. A slight stretching of the last word.
Not as big a stretch as "somewhere," but still enough to add another half- or three-quarters of a syllable to the word "bar." Because clearly, this is a place that was important -- not as important as the girl, of course, but important nonetheless.