Just Like Heaven

I’ve been listening to a lot of music that was on heavy rotation during my college years. It takes 15 minutes to drive Madeleine to school each day, and that’s good enough for 3-4 songs. For the last few weeks, I’ve been listening repeatedly to the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven”.

I knew the song was popular because of its great hook and musical arrangement, and I knew that Robert Smith was a gifted lyricist, but holy heck, it’s good.

The song uses a lot of repetition, recursively referential in it’s own motifs and themes. It’s like a vortex, some mythical siren song that I find myself spirallng uncontrollably into, deliriously lost in its mood.

Music:

The drum starts. The snare is sparing, repeating eighth notes, devoid of decorative fills until the guitar comes in. The monotony lulls the listener. 

The main hook is basically three repeating notes strung together –  C# G# and D repeating in threes, descending and ascending.   It’s such a simple melodic hook, but it’s simplicity burrows into something primitive in our brains and allows the brain to then registers the words.

A lot has been written about how the song extends the instrumentals for a long time – a full 49 seconds (23% of the song!)  – allowing each instrument – drum, bass, guitars, then synths – to make their entrance fully before the vocals comes on.  As I wait for the vocals to start, there’s a strong tension that my mind wants to resolves.  And the tension mirrors the longing and sense of lost, of empty space,  that the lyrics will mirror.  It’s just perfect.

I’ll also add that there there are lot more about the musical arrangement that goes beyond my observation.  Just check out the way Smith uses the low 3rd instead of the 1st note  to anchor the E major on some of the verses creates a surreal melancholic tone to the song… it’s epic.

Lyrics:

As I listened to the words over and over again on the daily drive, the song became a prayer, a mantra, a calling that implanted and merged with my own memories. 

I love how there are multiple points of views coursing through the song.  The singer remembers his past love – and she initially asks him about their relationship. “Show me, show me, show me..” she says.  And then after the first verse where she makes this lovely promise to ‘run away with you’, the lyrics elegantly shifts into back (up a level) to the narrator. He recounts what she’s doing — spinning on the dizzy edge; and what he does in return — kissed her face (and again, just one example of repetition where he uses “kissed” twice). 

The points of views works because they’re conversations that don’t meet.  The woman asks the questions, but as the singer responds, she is now in the past, and where do his words go? To us, to the listener to consider.

This interplay between the two people, but wrapped inside the memories of one of them, twisted and changed by the passage of time, is so lovely in it’s fragility.  Their relationship may be trite — boy doesn’t pay attention to girl, she leaves and he’s regretful — but in this remembrance, it becomes tragic.  He’s “far away” because he was actually thinking of all the ways to make her happy — or was that the truth? “Making her glow” awfully feels like the classic male gaze, where the boy puts the girl on a pedestal to be displayed and shown off.

I remember Christen telling me to stop putting her on a pedestal when we dated for the first time in college. She was the first girl to break this truth to me.  I, hopelessly romantic, had an image of girls that made me feel better about myself, that reflected the best in me.  In honesty, relationships are about recognize that the other is their own separate person, and dealing with their imperfections and faults on their own terms.  In a few lines, this song gets to that truth.

Apart from the POVs, literal and metaphoric levels also repeats the theme of lost love, hopefulness and beauty.  Robert Smith moves between literal and metaphor so beautifully.  The edge where the girl spins – that’s an evocation of admiration from the boy about her grace, the proximity to danger, the thrill of the relationship.  And repeating that theme again later, she’s ‘dancing in the deepest oceans, twisting in the water’ — this idea of movement as something to behold.  He’s focused on on her movement, and she on his placement, his nearness. He wants to behold her. She wants his touch.

This line just kills me with its simplicity and how it just bangs. “Daylight licked me into shape.” Such a great visual. It’s both heavy and light at the same time.  It just speaks to a scene where the boy is hungover, it’s noon, he’s had a rough night, and he wakes up, and she’s gone.  What’s the back story? The usual way to describe this scene might turn on a noun – “The sunlight blanketed me..” but turning daylight into an actor, and the verb “licked” – it’s both sexual and gross and affectionate and dirty all at once. Just that one word carries with it a thousand meanings backed by a multitude of stories.

Speaking of sex, the first line where the girl asks the boy to show her that trick — it’s just so so good. It’s a trick that makes her scream — and it immediately  connects the listener to a voyeuristic look at their sex life. It grabs you from the start.  But then, the girl continues — it’s the trick that makes her laugh — and the tone is suddenly shifted from serious to playful. Screaming to laughing – the majority, if not totality of most relationships.

I love this song so much.

There are so many other examples of repetition in this song, but I’ll go on to my favorite line: the boy “finds himself above a raging sea” which “stole the only girl [he] loved”, “only to drown her deep inside of [him]”.  God, it’s just perfect.  The actors in these three lines – the boy, the ocean and the girl — he’s speaking to the ocean, and in the end, the girl is the thing that remains in him. He’s not the one drowning in the ocean, the ocean is drowning the girl inside him.  This is such a legendary line – how it just perfectly captures the sensation that first loves have on us.

The visuals make me think of drowning and suicide and the depths of despair when you lose your first love.  It just brings back those raw feelings so much — now that I’m middle age and those intense feelings are mostly forgotten. This song brings me back – through the singer’s memories, my own memories are triggered. Recursive, on and on.. the song just keeps going deeper.