This song will only ever mean the morning after a spectacular night before in a borrowed flat with a girl who I hadn’t even imagined could possibly want to lean in and kiss me like that. Despite the fact that it’s a song about the falling apart of a relationship (“I can’t get over you/But I try, try, try, try”), it sounded every bit as optimistic and excited about the future as I felt as I sat there opposite her, unable to stop smiling and almost unable to look her in the eye, in case she’d reveal that the whole thing was just some extreme practical joke any minute. The day after I went back to real life, I bought this single and listened to it endlessly for the next week.
366 Songs 071: A Nanny In Manhattan
It’s been a stupid year so far; January was a rollercoaster of things and reactions and whatnot, but everything from February to March felt like a massive, horrific downer. Things Went Wrong, in such a way that upper case letters for the start of each word there makes sense and feels right, and as a result things like productivity went out the window in favor of feeling bad about myself, life and the whole shebang. I’m… hopeful, maybe…? optimistic, cautiously… that things may be closer to turning around and allowing me to breathe sometime soon (And I mean that at least partially literally; I have the flu of all things right now, and breathing isn’t easy), but that doesn’t change the fact that I am an appalling thirty entries behind in 366 Songs – and so, I’m changing things up, at least for the next few entries. No long(ish) essays, but instead songs and in as short as possible an explanation, why they’re something that is part of my personal psycho-geography. Trust me, you’ll understand it when you see it in action. To start with…
…the spectacular “A Nanny in Manhattan” by Lilys, which was the soundtrack of my first trip to New York in… 1998, I think? I had discovered it via the Levi’s ad that it was the soundtrack to, and taken the obsession with the frantic uber-retro with me to New York where I wandered around Greenwich Village and other places that had only ever been fictional to me, lovelorn over a particular girl and wanting the emotional equivalent of this song’s irrespressibility and immediate snap into action to come into my life.