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It’s more like: “Don’t you
ever
leave,” like, “Keep staying here, the way I’ve been telling you to do,” which is pretty straightforward, as love messages go. Basic.
    “Same Old Lang Syne”—Dan Fogelberg
    The first 45 I ever bought. It’s about a guy who runs into his old lover in the frozen foods section, and they reminisce and lie about how happy they are over a six-pack of beer in the backseat of her car. I want to say it’s Christmas Eve, but maybe that’s just my memory adding more drama. Then he gets out and she drives off into the night and the snow turns into rain and nobody gets what they want and now Dan Fogelberg is dead. I was nine. This song posited adulthood as a series of disappointments I couldn’t wait to grow up and face.
    “I’ve Never Been to Me”—Charlene
    In which a dissolute woman bothers some lady on a bench and launches unbidden into the story of her life. She’s seen it all: she’s been to the Isle of Greece, she’s sipped champagne on a yacht, she’s done it with a priest—outside on someone’s lawn, even. Charlene has been there and back. And in the middle of the song, she stops singing entirely and just starts talking to the poor lady, who by now I imagine has driven off, with Charlene following on foot: “You know what love is?” she asks, and we know she’s going to tell her: “Love is that husband you fought with this morning, the same one you’re going to make love with tonight,” she says. Charlene is dropping some truth bombs, and, not knowing many Charlenes—or many grown-ups, for that matter—I assumed she was Charlene Tilton, famous at the time for her work as loose cannon Lucy Ewing on
Dallas
(and for being a room-temperature mess in the front rows of music awards shows with her then-husband Johnny Lee). And then she gets back to singing, this time about the unborn children who might have made her complete, and my mother would tsk and say “Oh, for God’s sake,”—
O, fer Gad’s seek
—and change the channel because we are Catholic, and abortion in pop music is not going to fly. But such drama! If the people in my subdivision seemed to have it all together, Charlene was coming the fuck apart, and I wanted to listen again and again.
    “Magic Man”—Heart
    This song has it all: passion, poetry, that synth break in the middle that makes you feel like you’re on a spaceship. Plus it came out right in that 1970s moment when cults were at their peak, so I could imagine that it was about some mysterious figure in a white robe who came into the Wilson sisters’ lives and hypnotized them, permanently transforming them into pure beings of rock and roll by sheer force of will and charisma. That guy could be around any corner. He could mesmerize you, too.
    Now of course I realize it’s probably just about getting finger-blasted.

This is one of my most vivid memories from childhood: I’m in the backseat of the family station wagon. My father is driving, telling my mother about something that happened in the office that day. He’s a gesticulator, my dad, and he’s really going to town on this story. His face is serious as the tale unfolds—something about spreadsheets? Portfolios? I don’t know—yet my mother’s face beams. She is smiling like he is telling her she’s just won a cash prize of a hundred thousand dollars.
    “What?” my father asks her.
    “What
what
?”
    “Why are you smiling? This story isn’t all that funny.”
    “No, I know. I just don’t want them to think you’re yelling at me.” And she gestures around us at the other cars on Highway 40.
    In Catholic St. Louis, it is customary to put on a show for the rest of the world. You need to tell everyone around you that you are normal, and that everything is just fine. It is vital to keep up appearances, even for strangers, who, like you, are traveling at seventy miles an hour on a major highway.
    You don’t want to stand out. You want to be just like everyone else,