When I Fell In Love

With a song and an image

“For those listeners who obtain musical rewards from lyrics, there is a good chance that you first recognized yourself in songs when you were young…That sweet and volatile period between childhood and adulthood, best characterized by our quest for identity, can be comforted and indulged by the verbal messages in music” (Susan Rogers, This Is What It Sounds Like, Norton 2022, 134).

Maybe you don’t think that statement is telling or profound, but I do. Rogers’ study is intended to help readers who find their passion through music (or for whom music is a passion), to actually “find themselves through music.”

So if you’re wondering who you are, start examining the songs you love and perhaps read Rogers’ book so that you can remember why you like what you like and realize what your favorite songs might actually be saying about and to you.

I’m now jumping off the 2nd person soundwave to dig further into my own adolescence and the moment I fell in love with a song, an artist, a newer sound. While this song moves me sonically (its melody, rhythm, and harmony pleasing to my own personal aesthetics, whatever they are), it’s finally the voice and the lyrics which undid me, which made me ache and think that no one had ever found or expressed these images before.

And that I alone, over and above all other fans and casual listeners, understood them.

Remember, we’re talking about adolescence.

Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young’s album Deja Vu was released in 1970. Among the many LPs that I could have bought that year when I was fourteen, for some reason I spent my $4.77 one lazy afternoon on this one. Perhaps you’ll (oops) say that my affinity for country music and steel guitar caused me to latch on to “Teach Your Children” and so motivated this purchase. I would have a hard time arguing against that point of view, given that I do love the song, I do love country music, and I do love pedal steel. But as an adolescent, I would have admitted none of these things, and of the latter two, I’m not sure that I was even fully aware of them or what I felt about them.

The album produced two other Top 40 hits: “Our House” (“with two cats in the yard”) and “Woodstock,” a Joni Mitchell composition. These were fine songs, and so maybe it was the collective three of them that motivated my purchase. I so wish I could be adolescent me again for just as long as it takes to show late middle-aged me (still qualifying, I hope) why I decided to buy Deja Vu.

That doesn’t matter, however, as much as what happened once I put the record on the turntable and listened all the way through does.

It isn’t my purpose to sift through what I remember thinking and feeling about every song (though man did I love “Carry On” and wow did I not understand “Almost Cut My Hair”).

When people do not listen to entire albums it’s hard to estimate how much they miss, and so the greatest reward for me on this summer afternoon alone in my room was to get to side two, track #4. Here it is:

“Winding paths through tables and glass First flowers bloom Now watch the summer pass So close to you…”

I can assure everyone that when I first heard this song, I did not want or try to analyze its lyrics. But I heard them and I followed the narrative. Summer’s passing to an adolescent resonates almost unlike anything else. We don’t know what to make of time’s passing in general, except that we say “I can’t wait” about as often as we say anything else. And that seemingly eternal time from late May to September surprises most of us when it actually nears its end.

The narrative follows a guy who notices things in the indoor/outdoor cafe/bar he frequents.

“No pass out sign on the door set me thinking: Are waitresses paying the price of their winking? While stars sit at bars and decide what they’re drinking. They drop by to die cause it’s faster than sinking.”

Even then, I got stuck at the line about the waitresses. What price, what winking? One finally did wink at me a few years later, but that’s another story.

The confusion of these images, the conflux of has-beens and wannabes.

Composer Neil Young would go on to write many songs about fading away, burning out, but for this song, the image that pierced me was the one where all those waitresses boiled down to one girl:

“Find out that now was the answer to answers that you gave later She did the things that we both did before now, but who forgave her? If I could stand to see her crying I would tell her not to care When she learns of all your lying, will she join you there?”

I knew friends who lied to and about girls all the time. I knew others who told the truth, but I hated those truths.

My head was so jumbled then. I wanted to be in love; I wanted to hold a girl and stop her crying. I wanted to tell that friend of mine that No, I didn’t want to examine the proof of his latest conquest.

I can’t count the number of times I listened to this song, picking up the needle and repositioning it at the beginning. Someone stole my copy of Deja Vu while I was in college, and I hope when they listened to “Country Girl” they noticed that unintentional skip/scratch at the beginning and understand what they had done by taking this from me.

Before I reach the end, two things:

“Too late to keep the change Too late to pay No time to stay the same Too young to leave”

That’s what I think the chorus is. I mean, the words are exact, but the refrain is played twice in the song’s middle which surely signifies a narrative pause to consider, reflect, lament.

I thought about these lines so often then. And today, they’re some of the first lines that come to my mind when anyone asks about my favorite song.

And then the end, which is likely what first cast the spell of love on me:

“Country girl I think you’re pretty Got to make you understand Have no lovers in the city Let me be your country man.”

This is all I knew, all I ever wanted. I knew plenty of country girls, too, or at least county girls, given that our arbitrary town limits dictated who was urbane and who was redneck even though the two could practically live next to each other.

And then, the funniest thing of all.

We hadn’t been married long when my wife started referring to herself as “just a country girl.” I don’t know exactly what she intended, but the rest of the joke was,

“Yeah, but the country you’re from is Iran.”

Still, how could she know? How could either of us have known that we would meet, the only two married-to-each-other people in the world from Bessemer, Alabama. and Tehran, Iran? That in those adolescent days, I’d ask any soon-to-be-friend and potential lover if they adored Neil Young the way I did. If they had ever heard “Country Girl” and if not, would they try?

My wife did. She still does.

She understands me — the man I am now, and the adolescent I was before she ever knew me.

I understand, too: how a song can not only resonate at the time, but how in all its unpredictability and inscrutability, it can show a person the way through tables and glass to finding the truest love there is.

Thanks to Counter Arts for publishing.