Marooned by Phil Freeman

Author:Phil Freeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2012-02-28T05:00:00+00:00

Warwick occasionally deploys some uncharacteristically bluesy chops here—check the delivery of “way to do”—as though hoping to infuse the song with a subtlety it would prefer to resist. But the song, unlike “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” or “Alfie,” each of which luxuriated in an exciting, ever-changing present day, has its eye on the future, a future that is the embodied antonym of subtlety. Poised on the cusp of a decade that will focus much of its energy on overkilling a few inconvenient, incipient countercultural paradigms that were never really going to take root anyway, “I’ll Never Love This Way Again” reads the listener’s palm and finds the rot at the root. It’s sentimentalism at its worst—the “this” in the chorus is a cheap, mean trick—and its power, consequently, is deathless. Its ability to draw tears from dry eyes will not only never die: it will grow yearly, like calcium deposits on an unwashed faucet. In a way, it’s as immune to time as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” It is a nearly blank slate.

And because it has so little to offer, its shallows become depths if you look at them for too long. The effect of this makes me dizzy. What must it feel like for the narrator of this song, knowing that she will shortly begin descending from heights she can never hope to see again in her life? The song won’t say, or can’t; the singer knows what the song is driving at, and has the talent to make the song stand on its own two legs. But it has no legs, or the legs it has are boneless. These two dimensions cannot become three. That is their tragedy. And so they take on the sorrows of the listener as a sponge absorbing water. But the sponge is as big as the universe, and the song will never stop giving of itself.

On the beach, alone at last, I lick my wounds and stare at my boom box. How long can its batteries last? Not long at all, I’d guess. But what do you say we pretend the situation’s not hopeless, while we still have our sanity? Is everybody here up for a little of the young-Judy-Garland-style stiff upper lip? Is it cool if we just think out loud for a while? Is there any point in not talking to myself now? If I were Robinson Crusoe, I might forage for food, or craft a compass, or build a hut. If I were religious, I might pray. Instead, I do what any reasonable person in my position would do. I listen to “I Know I’ll Never Love This Way Again” for three consecutive hours, and I cry like a child.

“Arista Records,” I whisper to the translucent-bodied vermin who’ve taken up residence in the hair on my legs. I say it twice, and I pronounce it two different ways: “AIR-iss-tuh,” which is correct, and then “Uh-RISS-tuh,” which is wrong, but which was how I pronounced it the

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