Today’s song, apropos of my comments on the halfway point of
this series about which decades are racking up the most selections, is where a song of the
Aughts wins out over the Nineties. I’ve only known Greg Brown’s music since
around 1998, when my friend Andrew sent me a tape that contained several Greg
Brown songs, among other things, “Whatever It Was,” from 1997’s Slant 6 Mind, and “Two Little Feet” from
1996’s Further In. Before long, I had
both albums and that’s pretty much where my acquisition of Greg Brown music
languished. He had a lot of earlier LPs, but it seemed to me he was hitting his
stride in the late Nineties and those two albums were probably as good as
anything he’d done.
Somewhere in the early Aughts, I duped Covenant from my brother, Eric, who picked it up based on hearing some
of it on NPR. Not an NPR listener, ever,
I miss out on stuff like that. In any case, Covenant
struck me then as not quite as good as those other two, but not at all bad. Today I listened to all three albums and found myself wanting to hear Covenant again. It suited my mood, I guess. Today’s song I would say is a very good example of a “limbo song” because the situation
it describes is fitting for the state of mind I was mostly in, in the early
2000s.
I was tempted to pick “Two Little Feet”—which is one of Brown’s
unabashed feel-good songs, and always makes me happy to hear it—or “Whatever It
Was,” in which he makes a lot of wry observations about the world in general,
always ending with the line: “I was looking for what I loved / Whatever it was
is gone.” That was a line that made sense to me during some of the dark times
of the Nineties and after. A rueful reflection on the bad side of the times a-changin'. Then too, I’m big on “Where is Maria?” from Further In, a song
that hit me right between the eyes one day in the car—still had a tape player
in those days—so that I’ll never forget the feeling I got from it (that bit about “I'd like to go back to that room and stay there for awhile”). That song, which
might have been my first choice for a post, isn’t available on YouTube and I’m
trying to select songs that can be heard on the internet.
Which leads me, funnily enough, to today’s song, with its
reflections on the fact that “It seems nobody’s lonely any more / ‘Cept you and
me, babe.” Brown takes the position of someone aging beyond the reach of the
gadgets that mean so much to his juniors—“Half the people you see these days
are talkin’ on cellphones”—and that’s been a hallmark of our era, along with “livin' it up on the internet.” Brown, who is ten
years my elder, was 51 when the album came out and that could be swaying me a bit
too. Then too, we just had one of those drenching summer thunderstorms that charges
the air and creates that fresh and watery smell in the air, and “’Cept You and
Me” says “It’s raining sheets of rain,” and the song feels that way. Dark and
morose and lonesome. Yes, and what really made me select the song more than
anything is Brown’s guitar on it.
As a guitar player, Brown is always fun to hear, playing
with a very appealing funkiness. That’s the quality I would say comes across
most from Slant 6 Mind, a wonderful guitar album, and that’s
what I associate with him. But on today’s song, his guitar is more lyrical and
incisive. Which isn’t to say he’s not like that sometimes. I just thought of “Small
Dark Movie” which opens Further In
the way “You and Me” opens Covenant.
Both are songs of dysfunction, we might say. But “Small Dark Movie” never
completely jells into a position on the speaker or the speaker’s position on the
song’s protagonist (“you”). It gets a
bit elusive.
Not so on today’s song where, besides sheets of rain and
cellphones and the internet, Brown evokes the kinds
of people who meet somebody new and leave the past behind (“The kids will get
used to it / It happens all the time”), and, the line that always resonates
with me: “People used to spend quite a bit of time alone.” In Limbo Days, I did,
God knows, but I was also on the internet as the answer to that solitude. So I
see myself reflected in this song, particularly that sense of a kind of guilt
that comes from either being alone (and avoiding everyone who’s supposed to
know you), or not being alone (because on the internet) and letting other people be a distraction from
more arduous tasks. It’s a double-bind, in other words, and Brown’s lyrics get
at that, while his guitar keeps pricking and needling one’s composure, letting
you know that—face it—you’re not getting away with anything. “We can have it
all though our lives are short,” he says, giving us an update of the “Me decade”
view that there’s no earthly reason not to do whatever you want to do.
And Brown does bring this one on home. The double-bind comes
out and bites us (and him too) with: “I wanted to be your man, that was nothing
but a sweet dream / I always tell the truth to everyone – / 'Cept you and
me, babe, 'cept to you and me.” It’s a bit like the liar’s paradox in the sense
that the speaker says he always tells the truth to everyone—except himself
and the woman he’s addressing. And, whereas much of the song can be considered
as addressed to someone, it’s the line about wanting to “be your man” that is
clearly addressed to “babe.” And that’s the statement that we assumed was true
and which he underscores by saying “I always tell the truth to everyone,” only
to take it away with the repetition of the refrain.
All along the song had insisted that “you and me” were
different; that everything the singer characterizes with scorn, “you and me”
are exempt from. But once he allows that he knows there’s delusion in that
view, the whole notion of exclusivity and exemption collapses. And since the
song has been using deadpan irony in statements like “I guess nobody’s lonely
any more”—hinting that all these distractions are motivated by a loneliness
that the gadgets don’t solve—the ironies of self-delusion multiply. “We” aren’t
exempt from the loneliness either because that sweet dream (another name for delusion)
didn’t come true. Which means that “you and me,” like everyone else, avoid the
truth when we can.
No one is even
surprised any more.
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