All of This and Nothing: Under the Milky Way

"All of This and Nothing" 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, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

As I look forward over my list of Famous and Obscure, I'm mostly seeing Famous songs that are old and Obscure ones that are newer. And I wonder if what I'm really cataloging is that I paid attention to popular music when I was young, and got stuck into quirkier side-streams in the last couple of decades. Or maybe that there used to be a big general culture, more or less, and now there's just algorithms and narrowcasting.

Well, with nearly half the year behind me, I'm not going to change it up now. So stick a pin in that as an interesting potential point, and keep it in the back of your mind as I pick another "Famous" song that was a single back in 1988. (And maybe argue with me, in your head or in comments, that it really doesn't count as famous almost forty years later.)

For this week, the song is Under the Milky Way by The Church.

It's an atmospheric song, on the quiet side - as the title implies, it takes place at night, probably a dark night. The singer is talking to someone - maybe himself, but probably not - in this dark, quiet place, and wondering what it's all about.

Wish I knew what you were looking for
Might have known what you would find

I think this is a song inspired by a particular moment - "Sometimes when this place gets kind of empty," "Lower the curtain down on Memphis," and so on - probably after a concert, when singer Steve Kilbey was looking out over an empty, quiet space with a quiet dark sky above him. Or, at least, that's the story the song tells.

Songs don't necessarily tell the truth. They tell a story that the songwriter wants to put out into the world, and stories have their own shape. And that's the story this one tells: here we are, in a hushed, dark place. The singer (Kilbey) is talking to "you," about what seems like something broken or lost, and he's about to move on.

I got no time for private consultation
Under the Milky Way tonight