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Columns Warp + Weft Warp + Weft: Love-cars :: "Call Me Sometime, Best Friends Forever"
Columns Warp + Weft Warp + Weft: Love-cars :: "Call Me Sometime, Best Friends Forever" | Warp + Weft: Love-cars :: "Call Me Sometime, Best Friends Forever" |
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| Written by Steve McPherson | |
| Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 09:09 AM | |
 Love-cars "Call Me Sometime, Best Friends Forever" I'm Friends With All-Stars No Alternative 2000 Where I grew up, March was the worst month of the year. Obviously, June, July, and August were the best from age five until eighteen, but in September, the school year had barely begun. I always had a fondness for October because of my birthday, and then November, December, and January were broken up by major holiday vacations. Instead of Presidents' Day, we had a week-long February break, and then another in April and soon it was summer again. But there, deep in the second semester, lay a thirty-one day stretch unbrightened by any vacation, any three-day weekend, any anything to make high school tolerable. To make it a little more bearable, and stave off the effects of these March snowstorms, I give you the best song ever written about high school, "Call Me Sometime, Best Friends Forever" by Love-cars. Stream "Call Me Sometime, Best Friends Forever" below: Most of us (and by us I mean musicians, music critics, and serious music fans—all demographics to which I belong) spend our lives trying to outrun our high school lives and selves. We don't so much run straight away, though, as in ever-widening circles, that center of gravity continuing to shape the paths of our lives. And so, of course, for indie rock musicians in particular, teen angst is an almost limitless source of inspiration. This leads to a lot of songs that could take place during the high school years, but are not particularly grounded in high school. And sure, there are songs about the prom, and about your first time, and about your high school friends. There are anthems that variously lampoon or bluntly cash in on accepted ideas about teenagers ("Hot for Teacher," "School's Out"). There are plenty of songs that tap that reserve of uncertainty and awkwardness, but shockingly, not all that many that really evoke that time with clarity. Perhaps it's because most of these songs are written looking backwards. In early rock and roll and R&B, the teenage years were looked on as innocent, or at the very least naive and somewhat idyllic. Think of Sam Cooke's "Only Sixteen": "She was only sixteen / only sixteen / and I loved her so. / But she was too young / to fall in love / and I was too young to know." The twist, of course, is that the narrator is only sixteen himself. Since then, bands have projected all kinds of ideas onto the teenage years: a time of rebellion, a time of unbearable pain, a time of growing responsibility. Of course, many of these songs seem written expressly for teenagers, and as such treat them condescendingly. My rebellions were never more than petty, my pain never unbearable so much as unmovable and confusing. I would hazard that for those people who fall into any of those above named groups—those who found music as both an escape from and a voice for the troubles, big and small, that they went through—the dominant feeling of high school was confusion, mixed with a healthy dose of absolute conviction. If that makes sense to you, despite its paradoxical ring, then follow along with me. We'll get into some of the specifics that make "CMS BFF" so particularly great, but there's a foundational aspect to the song that make the entire thing really click: Singer James Diers never resorts to directly addressing feelings. A lot of songs about the teen years attempt to express some kind of inner turmoil without ever realizing that a central concern of many teenagers is their inability to adequately express their feelings. It's embarrassing, and they're just beginning to understand the adult feelings they're experiencing. Most anyone who's spent time around teenagers can certainly see that their primary modes of expression or overly mannered attempts at being grown-up. And so the narrator of the songs has a "chest that's filled with fists," "memorizes your walk," builds "a shrine to your homeroom." All of his expressions of real sentiment are turned inward. In the first verse, he surrounds these frustrations with the kind of details that sell us on the culture of high school: yearbook meetings, guidance counselors, and yellow slips (Hall passes? In my school they were pink, but you get the idea). What it all winds into is the ultimate outlet for all those cathected passions: A blank page in a yearbook. I remember well the possibility held forth by that stretch of white next to your high school's logo, and so does Diers: "Your yearbook is the universe expanding / your yearbook is the Grand fucking Canyon." That f-bomb holds forth all the meaning that's invested in the signing of yearbooks—it's your shot to make your mark on the person you most want to impress. So your mind reels with all the things you've been learning, all the things that you're supposed to be learning about but can't help you: The Great Wall, satellites, the Cold War, meteorites. But then a plan for eloquence builds: "Give me half the first clean page / I'll raise Gandhi from the grave / with words that Everest can't touch / all the things you need so much." But the push-pull of that supremely awkward age, that tension between social anxiety and the most social time of your life, gets the better of the narrator when he goes to write and all that comes out are bland yearbook wishes: "Stay sweet this summer, k? / Don't party to hardy / C-M-S B-F-F / C-M-S B-F-F."  The music rises in intensity over the entire arc of the first verse and chorus, so even as the narrator's inner emotional state goes from unsure to anxious to confident to inadequate, the band pushes the song harder along a different axis, underscoring the tension between outward appearance and inner turmoil. The second verse and chorus redraw this arc, but the perspective of the lyrics is shifted back a touch, hinting at an insight into the temporariness of everything that seems so important. "What's so magic about your marker?" asks Diers. "What's so magic about your friends? / Last days were never meant to last / Loose ends and trends divide by tens." But if the close of the first verse finds him galvanized but still unsure of himself, the second verse is approaching desperation, and it closes with what is simply one of the most brilliant lines I've ever heard: "I memorized the moon / Built a shrine to your homeroom / With hands both black and red it ticks me through the fifth of June."It's such a fine attention to detail—the colors of the hands on every clock in every high school, the simultaneous pressure and release of June and the close of the school year—rendered in such a rush up to the second chorus. It's the hinge the entire song is built around—the confusion and frustration over not being able to adequately express yourself combined with an absolute assurance that what you most want is equally what you most need. The song doesn't preach, nor does it wallow, it simply does what art's been doing for hundreds of years: Giving the shape and sense to life in retrospect that it lacks in the moment. To hear this song is to acknowledge that you made it through all that or, if you're still going through it, that you're going to make it out intact. It's an affirmation that the currents of high school are navigable and that you'll make it through year after year of vacationless Marches and somehow be able to make some kind of sense of it all. |
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| Last Updated: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 09:12 AM |
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