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I will never, as long as I live, get over the fact that a song with these lyrics appeared on an album scheduled to be released on Sept. 11, 2001, but which was then pushed back to April 2012. 
The album came out when my son was an infant. The world still felt out of joint. What kind of world had we brought him into. The line "our love is all we've got honey" swam through my mind almost every day as I fell in love with this little creature.
Summer of 2002 we were visiting Philadelphia, a city we loved and from which we'd just moved away. We were pushing the stroller down South St. and this song blared from a car radio. It felt like a sign of something.
The book end to that song for me is "Hey Jude." It came out in the late summer of '68 when I was an infant. My dad tells a story of listening to that song while watching American cities burn, still stinging from the assassinations of MLK & RFK. What world had I been brought into?
To my mind, the defining feature of being a Gen Xer has been the everpresent, creeping sense of decay which the public transcript of our sunny, Reaganite culture has insisted to us was NOT HAPPENING, everything is fine. (Lyrics from Sweethearts by Camper Van Beethoven, 1988)
Buildings collapse...tall buildings shake...
It often feels like America is enjoying its last cigarette these days.
But who knows, maybe infrastructure week will eventually actually happen.
It often feels like America is enjoying its last cigarette these days.
But who knows, maybe infrastructure week will eventually actually happen.
Or to put this corney refrain in the key of Hey Jude...maybe we'll eventually figure out how to take a sad song and make it better.
