Turn Around Bright Eyes

If you’re lucky, and the beer doesn’t run out, it’s more than just a night of debauchery. It’s a spiritual quest.

People always meant “you’re new here” as praise. They were obviously seeing something human on my surface that made them want to do me favors or give me a break, but it was obviously the trace of that girl who had loved me, molded me, shaped me into whatever I was, the girl who had died. I felt like a fraud traveling under those pretenses.

I distrust grace when it’s amazing. I like my grace to be drab and ordinary and manageable. And I prefer the universe to be methodical and tedious, making its moves one at a time, with change as something I can see coming in the distance, a slow train round the bend.

Are you really setting your hopes on not getting hurt at all? You think that’s an option? You clearly aren’t listening to enough Morrissey songs.

I was afraid of getting trapped in the past, turning my life into a shrine to the good things that used to be alive in me. I knew the future would be a challenge, as well as an adventure, and I knew it would be difficult. But I couldn’t keep hiding forever. I needed to make changes and I needed a safe place to make them.

It’s a post-adolescent phase most of us reach, after we get mature enough not to depend on music for all our self-validation.

Music responds to a lot of human needs, but one of those is public communication—feeling like you’re part of an audience, connected with other people who care about the same things. That really has nothing to with reliving youth, or prolonging youth, or anything to do with youth at all.

Once you reach that point in your life, you may not be the target audience for new music anymore. But that just means you have to scrounge a little harder to find it. You don’t necessarily want to make a religion out of it; you just want to keep participating.

You owe this song a lot. You feel like the “She Loves You” guy helped turn you into the “I Want to Hold Your Hand” guy you became later, and the “Strawberry Fields” guy you never wanted to be, and whoever you are tomorrow. Maybe someday (but not today) you will give up trying to understand the song, and just let “yeah yeah yeah” speak for itself. Then it will all make sense.

People can turn anything into a love song if it helps keep them together. The artist doesn’t really get a say in the matter—it definitely doesn’t matter what the artist might intend the song to be about.