"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.
I have never seen this video before; I'm discovering it, right at this moment, as I prepare this post. And it is...one of the most 1970s things I have ever seen in my life, and I lived through the entire 1970s, as a very young and impressionable person. Wow. Maybe just listen to the song this time.
The song is Romeo and Juliet, and it's my choice from Dire Straits. That's a cliché, I'm sure, but it is one of the great love songs of my life, and I'm not going to apologize for liking something so true and pure and nearly perfect.
(If I'd made this list late in my teen years, the song that might have edged this one out is Brothers in Arms, a lovely song for listening to, late at night, probably through headphones, and thinking about whether the world will ever, or can ever be any better than it is. I'm not sure if my opinion on that is much different than it was then, sadly.)
You promised me everything. You promised me thick and thin.
Now you just say: Oh Romeo, Yeah you know I used to have a scene with him
I've always had a weak spot for cleverness, and this is a clever song. (Dire Straits was generally a pretty clever band, too - think of Industrial Disease and even Money for Nothing, though it's hard to see its cleverness after its been so overplayed for so long.)
Do I need to say that when I say "love song," I almost always mean "song of loss and broken hearts"? Maybe not. But I just did.
This is a magnificent, lovely song. And a quite interesting, very much of-its-time video, too, which I was not expecting at all this morning.
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