You & Me

We Say...

Review by Yancey Strickler

The Walkmen can't stop apologizing. Makeup-covered bruises, lipstick on the collar, slivers of broken glass underneath the refrigerator, a glance that elicits an immediate flinch — this is the destruction they have wrought. But never again. Now, apologies and promises. Promises that won't be kept, certainly, and vocalizations of half-hopes, things intended but doomed, and everyone knows it. Everyone, including you & me.

They're trying, though. They're trying real hard. "Last Christmas was black and blue/ but this year is white," they sing. "You know I'd never leave you/ no matter how hard I'd try/ You know I'd never leave you/ that's just how it is," they protest, and you know it's true but it'd be better if it weren't.

Even when things have fallen apart, the last straw left on a stranger's nightstand, there is still the hope of no expectations. "I'm still living/ at the old address/ and I'm waiting on the weather/ and I know at last/ I know that it's true/ it's going to be a good year," and then an organ pierces like an implosion, its gait wobbly, its rhythm untrue. The guitars clang, the drums do this halting pause ("is it really ... you?"), the organ violent in its urgency. "Out of the darkness/ and into the fire," they scream.

There are forty acres and a mule. "We'll move away/ We'll buy us some land/ build us some homes/ and no more will we stray," they plead. There's honesty in their dishonesty. Failing, tactics shift, façades go missing: "Take me tonight as I am/ Leave me the way I was found," just anything. Anything anything anything. I'll read Manhattan Transfer to you by shaded light and we can laugh at those fools, chasing what? What can those suckers hope to find?

Pretend Ralph Kramden awoke with a conscience. "You keep replaying the days/ that brought you to this place." Convincing themselves they feel good about the bad decisions. Pretending they've known all along they weren't mistakes. The tightness in the corners of their mouths slackening a little, wanting it to be true so badly that they physically feel it. "What happened to you/ What happened to you/ What happened to you" they mourn, but for whom do they cry? You, or me?

It ends with escape. "My dream ain't through/ And when I've had enough/ then I'll die in dreams of you." A road, headlights, pledges of better days from the double-yellows, defiance at the past, never forgotten.