I think I’m Comin’ Home

 

What dark arts are invoked in the creation of a song that makes you wistful for the person you never were, for a past that never happened? A song able to instantly transport you back to a place you’ve never been and one capable of effortlessly summoning feelings of loss, desire and longing, seemingly out of the ether? 

 

Almost every pop song ever written is either about love, or the loss of that love. Loss is powerful, maybe even more powerful than love, because loss walks in lockstep with hate. But longing is even stronger still, as it leads us to make irrational justifications for situations that are, perhaps, not, as Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham sing in the classic Fleetwood Mac breakup song Go Your Own Way, “the right thing to do.”

 

Watch contemporary Fleetwood Mac performances of this song and you can see the loathing Nicks developed for Buckingham in every small gesture she makes, every intonation in the lyrics she’s singing. It was visceral and it must have torn her apart to get up on stage and sing Go Your Own Way, harmonising with someone she hated night after night.

 

But there still must have been some rump of feeling left. A degree of longing and wistfulness for what they had had and had lost. “Loving you isn’t the right thing to do.” It says it right there on the tin – I’m still in love with you, but we can’t keep doing it.

 

Part of the thrill for the audience in a song like Go Your Own Way is the fact it provides a titillating insight into a celebrity breakdown. And it doesn’t hurt that it’s a truly excellent song played by master musicians including Mick Fleetwood, whose drumming in the track is next level. 

 

But does it make the audience feel anything apart from sympathy, maybe? The answer is no. Go Your Own Way internalises its emotions. For the listener, Go Your Own Way is a shiny bauble that’s built on pure externalities. It’s a song about Nicks and Buckingham’s relationship breakdown, and as outsiders we don’t have access to what’s going on inside.

 

Once, just maybe, I was a girl

 

My undergrad days are well, well behind me. But back in those prismatic times, I was skinny, wore tights and combat boots and had hair down to my waist. I was so skinny, and my hair so long, that on more than one occasion – and this is surprising - I was mistaken for a woman by faculty. Then they looked a little closer and twigged to the reality of me being a bloke.

 

But I’ve always been fascinated by androgyny, that liminal, between gender identities state that I fell into a handful of times.

 

The fluidity appealed, and appeals to me, and contributed to my realisation in later years that I, as hoary 70’s rockers Supernaut once sang, like it both ways. 

 

What do you want from me? What can I give you?

 

A few years ago, I discovered US darkwave act Boy Harsher. I don’t know exactly how I got into them – like most new bands and artists I dig up, it’s essentially an osmotic process. They permeate my environment and awareness and, often, I end up obsessed.

 

Their track Face the Fire, off the album Careful, is the polar opposite to Go Your Own Way. Where the Fleetwood Mac track internalises its emotions, Boy Harsher is all about conveying a series of feelings its audience can relate to. Face the Fire is laden with androgynous wistfulness, longing, desire and loss.

 

It’s Face the Fire that is constructed with mysterious alchemy, transporting me to a life I never had and a past I never experienced. A past life that was possible, but I was too dumb, naïve and scared to articulate the deep vibes I had about myself at the time and so it never happened.

 

Who is this enigmatic mirror-universe me? I can never be that individual, the time for that has long passed, but I can still feel the feelings and submerge myself in the irrational longing of that might’ve-been person when I listen to Face the Fire. Longing is a powerful emotion, perhaps the most powerful of all, because it makes us so vulnerable and powerless in the face of feelings we may not truly understand - or even want to understand.

 

Careful.