March 18, 2025

Three Musical Notes

1. Am currently being haunted by “Holding Out for a Hero” by Bonnie Tyler. I’m not mad about it. We watched Footloose on DVD a couple of weeks ago, and my kids were struck by the wonderful weirdness of Kevin Bacon dancing in a warehouse (especially after having watched Jennifer Beals dancing in a warehouse just a couple of weeks before that in Flashdance, albeit one that’s post-industrial). A few days later, I danced around our living room to the song’s very dramatic Steinmen-esque opening imagining that I was Kevin Bacon, until I ran out of breath about 45 seconds later. Later that day my kids were out and heard “Holding Out for a Hero” playing at the grocery store. The next day, it was playing at the pool where I was swimming. Today it was playing in the background of a stupid casino ad I was served on a podcast. I can’t wait to hear it next. Truly, the lyrics have never felt so resonant, though that might just be my daddy issues talking.
2. I have spent over 40 years confused by the song “Our House” by Madness, and how exactly their house was in the middle of the street, which always seemed really dangerous. Eventually, I reasoned that they likely resided in the kind of flatiron structure that turns up in English movies like Bridget Jones Diary and Spice World, and truthfully—after now having spent a fair bit of the time driving in the UK, where houses turn up in the middle of streets all the time and the roads have to be routed around them, and where you might stand a good chance of knocking off your side mirror one somebody’s front room window sill—it almost made a kind of sense. But now I’ve just informed that “our house in the middle of our street” actually means that the house is just in the middle of the row of houses on the street. Like, “Our house is halfway down the block.” I was disappointed; doesn’t that just sound incredibly dull? My husband (who was correcting me on all this) responding that the rest of the song isn’t terribly interesting either, with lines like, “Our mum she’s so house-proud/ Nothing ever slows her down and a mess is not allowed.” Which, I guess, is why they brought in horns, to liven the whole thing up a bit.
3. I have only ever been bored by the song “A Girl Like You,” by Edwyn Collins, which was all too ubiquitous after showing up on the 1995 soundtrack to the movie Empire Records, and I never listened close enough to consider there might be anything interesting about it. Also, wasn’t Edwyn Collins just some old guy, in my mind tainted by his association with Phil (who was actually no relation)? This question and other misconceptions are considered fascinatingly in the latest Bandsplain podcast, whose biggest twist continues to be that I can listen so avidly to a conversation about a song I don’t even like, or at least I thought I didn’t like it, but now I do.