Why don’t we call it a day and we can both confess..? Forever lodged at the end of side one of the first album filled with the promise of a world of music, or at least fifteen minutes of music, I’ve never heard before and never will again with that fresh wide, eyed, excitement: like the world is filled with girls and only these smatterring of words and put downs, sarcasm, alliteration, puns and pain to get back at her: revenge and guilt, revenge and guilt.
The song has been humming in my head for days now and not because of the coda to end all codas (“I’ve still got a long way to go”) and not because of Huey Lewis’s News chugging all over the back ground, but because it seems so flat footed and sure at the same time.
It’s like there is no other words to express the surprise wonderment of love and sex, of thwarted desire: “We can sit like lovers staring in each others eyes but the magic moment might become too much for you” and Costello (and you and I) make it out the other side of the couplet with our dignity -barely-, in tact.
Earlier, “We can force me to use a little tenderness” with its half turn on the the old Sam Cook (well, that’s my fave version) song.
Force? tender? Tender force? He coulda called My Aim Is True tender force… Actually he coulda called everything up to and including Get Happy!! tender force.
Everything is so provocative, every feeling so raw the words and the classic fiftiesish Bo diddley, Check berry -all of em, waiting for the end of the side, everything is just on the nerve.
Safe in dreams but in real life, we can’t get right through anything. It is ceasation and a continuation…
And we still had a long way to go.