Back to Terry’s five questions: “If you had to live in a song, what would it be?”
A song where everything’s still the same:
Everybody’s had a few
Now they’re talking about who knows who
I’m going back to the Crescent City
Where everything’s still the same
This town has said what it has to say
Now I’m after that back highway
And the longest bridge
I’ve ever crossed over Pontchartrain
Tu le ton temps that’s what we say
We used to dance the night away
Me and my sister, me and my brother
We used to walk down by the river
Mama lives in Mandeville
I can hardly wait until
I can hear my Zydeco
and laissez le bon ton roulet
And take rides in open cars
My brother knows where the best bars are
Let’s see how these blues’ll do
in the town where the good times stay
Tu le ton temps that’s all we say
We used to dance the night away
Me and my sister me and my brother
We used to walk down by the river
That’s Lucinda Williams’ “Crescent City.” The appeal of this song–aside from the gorgeous fiddle–is how the Crescent City and environs are static, but alive: full of walking, driving, gossip, dancing. And just in case all that activity isn’t enough to keep things from getting stale, the song contains the outside space of wherever the narrator is returning from.
Of course, everything in “Crescent City” is really just in the narrator’s head–the song takes place while she’s on the road home. Yet the scenes she imagines are so vivid (helped out by that fiddle), it’s easy to forget that they’re only imagined. In this, the song has something in common with a poem so famous, it’s hard to hear freshly:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of dancing daffodils;
Along the lake, beneath the trees,
Ten thousand dancing in the breeze.
The waves beside them danced, but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee;
A poet could not but be gay
In such a laughing company.
I gazed, and gazed, but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought–
For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Before the standard-bearers get their noses all out of joint over the comparison, let me state that I am not putting Lucinda on the same artistic plane as Bill. (Now I’ll probably hear from the people who think Wordsworth suffers from the comparison!) I’m just pointing out that the song and the poem are each about the memory of their apparent subject. But they both make their remembered scenes so vivid that you easily forget they’re really about the reveries of a woman behind the wheel of a car and a guy on a couch.
My runner-up is David Bowie’s “Kooks.”