Severin the Wanderer:
"I woke to a grey morning here in Fantasyland with this song running my head. By now the sun has burned off the marine layer and we are back in our accustomed daze of light, but I'm still struggling to wring..."
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Severin the Wanderer:
"I woke to a grey morning here in Fantasyland with this song running my head. By now the sun has burned off the marine layer and we are back in our accustomed daze of light, but I'm still struggling to wring clarity from this lovely song's melancholy. Here is what i have deciphered so far - an ongoing process.
Like so many great songs, “You Win” is a one-sided conversation between a lover and the one who left. It would be easier, and far more acceptably glib, to call her “the one who got away,” but the singer frames the narrative as a choice: she wins by choosing the material over the emotional, the real life of houses and shopping over the intangibles of affection and esteem. She wins a big house, her mother’s approval and the worship of a shell-man: a BIG life, as we’re taught to perceive it. But “when you win, your wrinkles show. Under your smiling, the fondness comes and goes with the losses you have known… You feel you’ve been lifted above all the other houses on the country road just to be shown the nothingness and how far it really goes.” Where would we be without irony? Because we only have two hands, and life is pulling against us so hard, we must let go of something, either our dreams and vision of something durable and deep, or the simple wealth of the solid, blunt world. Whether or not the choice is simple, she makes it. And in the process, what seems on the outside to be enrichment – growth – becomes diminution instead: the slow, steady erasure of her humanity. His lover recedes into the hazy distance, and all he can do is call out to her as she fades away. Perhaps from this distance, she won’t even understand the words.
So where does that leave me, as I come to appreciate this song? I think I’ll buy a another motorcycle, something old and dark and British. Beautiful, simple metal. As I weave my Bonneville through shrieking traffic, this song will race my thoughts to the next light. When I bought my first bike, the seller cautioned me, “Ride like you’re invisible, because you are.” And that’s just what I want to be.
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