This Year: 1984

"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more. 

No one ever left me; I never left anyone. My love life was dull and simple and almost entirely devoid of drama; I'll have been married for thirty years in about a month.

But we don't love songs because they're exactly the same as our own lives, do we? (Wait: do we? Do most people look for songs that are as close as possible to their exact situation? Because I never have.)

I listened to a lot of R.E.M. in the '80s, because R.E.M. was one of the indisputably best bands in the universe that decade, and I was just the right age to listen and appreciate and sing along tunelessly to a sequence of great songs.

It was hard to pick one song, but I needed something that was sweet and true, a little slurry but still understandable - something from those early years when jangly guitars and mumbled lyrics meant the world.

The other major candidates - here, again, I have to again apologize for how reflexively quirky I seem to be, by nature - were the very early propulsive 1,000,000, which had the bad luck to be in the already-crowded year 1982, and the goofy Underneath the Bunker, which still comes to mind randomly all the time.

But I landed on something maybe more conventional, something I think more central: (Don't Go Back to) Rockville, a great, aching love song that is all want and no sign of closure.

I love songs with a clear voice, a clear viewpoint - songs talking to someone, in a moment, trying to convince another person, even when it's clear that argument is long lost and over. Rockville is like that; the speaker is telling the other person that she (she? we'll say she; that seems to be the most likely story) must come back, and that they must be together...even though, the singer admits, that probably wouldn't be a good thing.

It's a song that contradicts itself, a song that wanders around, like a real conversation does, a song about things that didn't happen or that might happen or that could happen in the future. A loving, aching song that's happier than it seems it should be. The music, that twangy, country-rock guitar and loping beat, perfectly fulfills that feeling, too - sad, but not overly sad, as if it's play-acting the sadness for maximum effect in the moment. It doesn't seem to work - the song can never convince her not to go - but that's not the point; the point is to say it. 

It's a song that can only come from that youthful moment, that sense that everything is possible and all the world is open. That we have all the time in the world, and the worst thing possible is to be separated now.

Don't go back to Rockville - waste another year.