-Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
There's this book out called something to the effect of 1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die, and it seems to have some sort of marketing push behind it. I see it in every book store music section, the last time I visited Borders.com (which I don't do very frequently, unless I want to see if the local store has something in stock) they were running a promotion based on the book, and the guy who wrote the book was on NPR's All Songs Considered show. I flipped through the book once, and I wasn't impressed because it failed my Let It Be test. That is, it was another list of great albums that chose the Replacements album Let It Be, despite the superiority of Pleased to Meet Me and Tim.
I have a theory about why Let It Be is the beneficiary of so much critical groupthink, and it's pretty simple. This was the Mats' breakthrough album, and this combined with the band's cheeky theft of a Beatles' album title makes it the first Replacements album that list creators think of when they remember that they have to include the band on such lists. (This particular list is based more on whims and arbitrary decisions, which makes it better.) I firmly believe that the Pogues' Rum, Sodomy and the Lash gets a similar boost because of it's title, even though I much prefer If I Should Fall From Grace with God, which even includes "Fairytale of New York", by far the band's biggest hit. It's not that I hate the Let It Be album (well, I don't hate the Mats' Let It Be album. I come closer to hating the Beatles Let It Be album than any other Beatles album, which is largely irrational but there you go.) There are some good songs on Let It Be, like "Answering Machine" and "I Will Dare", but it also features a dreadful Kiss cover and the juvenile "Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out", which I'm sure some people love but I can't stand. How this compares with the near-perfection of the next two Mats albums eludes me. (The fact that the Decembrists' Colin Meloy used the book as an excuse to write an autobiography of his teenage years in the guise of a book about the album probably doesn't help its case with me either.)
But I'm here to praise "Skyway", not bury Let It Be. It's a deceptively simple song, barely two minutes long, and if you aren't listening, you might miss the bass and Mellotron entirely, only hearing the two acoustic guitars and Paul Westerberg's vocals. One associates the Mats with sloppier romps like, say, "Seen Your Video" or "Dose of Thunder", but the band's true brilliance lies in their ability to place those songs beside quieter, more reflective songs like "Sixteen Blue" or "I'll Be You" or "Skyway". There's a quote from Paul Westerberg to this effect that I thought was in the liner notes for the All or Nothing compilation, but I can't find it. At any rate, he boosts that while plenty of bands from the same era of the Mats could match their boisterous hard songs, none of them could have also done "Skyway".
The song's lyrics are built around the rhymes and near-rhymes for "way", from the Skyway in downtown Minneapolis- "skyway", "one-way", "awake", "subway", "place", "one day", "every day", "say". This simple rhyme is the skeleton for the song. The rhyme scheme goes:
AABB
AAACCA
AAAA
I just realized that the song is a sonnet, if you ignore the final two "Skyways" that Westerberg sings at the end. That's cool. The song's lyrics begin by distancing the narrator from whoever he's addressing (I always assume it's a woman, but there's no actual evidence that it is), who is taking the warm skyway above the street while the narrator is below, wearing his "stupid hat and gloves" to stay warm in the cold Minneapolis weather. They're on the same street, and he can see the other person, but they might as well be miles apart. ("Kiss Me On The Bus" offers an interesting counterpart to "Skyway". On this form of transit, "everyone's looking forward" , and the narrator and his girl are on the same level, at least physically. Emotionally, he's a little behind her, pointing out that "If you knew how I felt now/You wouldn't act so adult now/They're all watching us/Kiss me on the bus". In "Skyway", he doesn't even get the chance to make this plea). In the middle of the second line, the narrator shifts from the cold street to his bed, where he he lies awake "wonderin' if I'll sleep, wonderin' if we'll meet out in the street", wondering if she'll leave the warmth of the skyway and come down to his level. "But you take the skyway" he immediately responds to start the next stanza. He points out that the warm skyway, has "got bums when it's cold like any other place", suggesting that perhaps the skyway isn't so far removed from his place in the one-way street below, where he's sitting in the cold "waitin' for a ride" (Skyways are generally connected to office buildings, and whoever it is in the skyway probably can afford their own car, and doesn't have to wait for someone to pick them up, or have to take the subway that the narrator mentions in the second line of the stanza, pointing out the skyway "don't move at all like a subway", which would be another layer of transit below, if Minneapolis had a subway, which a quick googling suggests it doesn't). But in the final stanza, the narrator finally sees the other person "walkin' down that little one-way", finally giving him a chance to "meet out in the street". They're even at "the place I catch my ride most everyday". Unfortunately, this isn't most everyday, as today the narrator is actually up in the skyway (possibly in an attempt to finally meet up there, it's unclear). So, despite the other person finally being on the narrator's usual level, "there wasn't a damn thing I could do or say". As irony goes, it isn't quite O. Henry, but it'll still do. The metaphor is still satisfying (or rather, for the narrator, unsatisfying) for anyone who has ever felt like they've missed their big chance. And all accomplished in barely two minutes.
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