"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.
This song meant nothing to me before I was a father. Now, I start to mist up even thinking about it. Kids, man - they change you in ways you never see coming.
This is one of the big famous songs in the list - so big and so famous that I hesitated to include it; you all know this one already. But the point of a list like this isn't to showcase weird obscure stuff I happen to like, but to honestly list a whole bunch of songs that I care about. And this one qualifies - for the past two decades, if not when I was young and free and callow.
Paul Simon wrote Slip Slidin' Away in the mid-70s, releasing it as a new song on what was mostly a "greatest hits" record. We don't know if it's autobiographical. It probably is, to some degree, because that's where true emotion always comes from: the things that happen to you.
There are four verses - three about specific, unnamed people, and one about all of us. It's full of crisp, precise language that says true things in the ways only a great song can, and the music is quiet and soothing, as if to try to temper the bone-deep sadness in those words.
If you don't listen closely, it could sound happy, with its muted doo-wop background singers and quiet late-night vibe. If you don't think too closely about what Simon is singing, it could still. But once you've really heard it - even more once you've felt something like the people in those first three verses - you can never go back.
We work our jobs
Collect our pay
Believe we're gliding down the highway
When in fact we're slip slidin' away
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