This Year: 2016

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

2015 was a scratch, like 1971 - as I was making this list, I ended with fifty-two songs, exactly matching the weeks of the year, and thought that was exactly what I wanted. So I jump forward two years this week, to 2016.

I wanted a song by Lydia Loveless on this list, and for a while I thought it would be Head, which is quietly devastating, or maybe European, which could come across as a joke to some people. (It isn't: or, rather, it's the kind of joke someone makes in the moment to play off a moment of pure emotional honesty that hits so horribly wrong.) Boy Crazy is a lot of fun; her cover of Elvis Costello's Allison is lovely; Can't Change Me and More Like Them might be more quintessential Loveless attitude.

But, instead, it came down to Same To You. I've had a lot of break-up songs this year, but this one, well - can you break something that wasn't in one piece to begin with?

Well is there nothing I could do to make you look at me that way again?
I’m not gonna fall in love with you man but if that’s really it
Could you just wave goodbye?

I like the tension in this song, the way it feels like the singer gives as good as she gets - both I’ll have to take a few so I don’t talk back and That’s where I almost killed you but honey give me one more chance. The relationship isn't clear - probably on purpose. This could be new and not clicking, it could be old and falling apart.

(It reminds me, a bit, of the "Alpha Couple" from a lot of Mountain Goats songs, especially the record Talahassee. This is another couple that isn't good for each other, though not as pyrotechnically.)

One last thing: I always heard the refrain as If it's the same to you, then I'm gone.

But the lyrics on the Bandcamp page have it as If it's the same to you that I'm gone, making the whole refrain a longer, more complicated question.

And that's what I love about great songs: they have further depths, more questions. As this one does, they open up instead of closing down.