This Year: 1990

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

I only know this song from the deepest serendipity, and I love it even better for that. When I was in college, They Might Be Giants played the place, and I went to the concert (upstairs in a decent-sized paneled room, part of the College Center - not any of the bigger spaces associated with gymnasiums or such) with my then-girlfriend, now-wife.

The opening act was a band I'd never heard of, Grace Pool. I think they had their first record out at the time, but not the second one. (They never had a third; they never made it big. I don't know if they even made it medium-sized; I never heard them on the radio.)

They impressed that day, in that small room, and they sounded even better on record. And one song from that second record is my song for 1990, the year I graduated college: Wedding on the Lawn.

Someone to take care of, someone's idea of love

I think we did play this song at our wedding, which was not on a lawn. It's a bit too fast to dance to, and not quite as happy as a song with "wedding" in the title is assumed to be.

No falling back into yesterday. It's gone. It's over.

It's a song about something momentous, told emotionally, from inside - maybe call that at a slant. It's about a day, a time, when your whole life changes, when the world shifts around you and reconfigures. And I heard it when I was in the middle of those times in my own life, so it will always remind me of that - of graduation and new jobs and weddings and buying a house. 

And behind all that is a relentless beat - quick, continuous, simple. Like a clock ticking, but faster. Time at all of our heels.

I was also an English major, and so I guess I was poised to love a band with a name like "Grace Pool" anyway. But, whatever the reason, I did, and still do. This song will always remind me of 1990, of the early '90s in general and my early twenties in particular, and we all always love songs that do that for us.