Still in Rotation: Singles-45′s and Under (Squeeze)

Things I Mutter Aloud To Myself as I ... Oh Yes It’s Ladies Eighties Night

Still in Rotation: Singles-45′s and Under (Squeeze)

Still in Rotation is a feature that lets talented writers tell Midlife Mixtape readers about an album they discovered years ago that’s still in heavy rotation, and why it has such staying power.

When Vogue magazine’s three inch thick September issue hits the newstands each year, I don’t think, “Yay, fashion!” I think, “Yay, Philpott’s about to take it DOWN.” Mary Laura Philpott, aka “I Miss You When I Blink”, has a way with interpreting fashion, and that way is ROFL. She also has a way with hot-gluing googly eyes to nuts, having designed the cover of the Moms Are Nuts anthology in which we both have essays (don’t miss the outtakes from that photo shoot). But most of all, Mary Laura is a gifted and funny writer, and I’m honored to have her here talking about her “Still in Rotation” pick.

Singles-45′s and Under (1982)

The music you listen to when you’re old enough to know what love and sex and relationships are, but too young to understand how they really work, is a Rosetta stone of sorts–a key to deciphering a language you don’t yet fluently speak. So it was for me with Squeeze.

45s and Under had been around for several years when I first heard it at the beginning of 8th grade. Amy, the junior who made a little cash driving me and a carload of other kids to school, popped it into the cassette player of her purple 1972 Cutlass. Because she listened to it, we listened to it. Adopting the musical habits of a 17-year-old was the kind of thing that could give a not-quite-13-year-old a sense of oversized sophistication – like a 6-year-old clomping around in her big sister’s clogs or a 10-year-old staring at her reflection in a mirror, two little fingers clamped around an invisible cigarette, blowing imaginary smoke through her Chapsticked lips. I don’t really know what I’m doing, but what will it be like when I do?

That tape played through 20 minutes of traffic in the morning and back again in the afternoon, almost daily, at a volume that made it impossible to talk over the music – a distraction for which I was grateful. Having just moved into town, I had nothing to talk about with these people yet. So I just listened. Eventually, I sang along.

The songs told stories about relationships: hooking up, breaking up, and a variety of other strange encounters I didn’t quite grasp, but would soon enough. Probably the most popular were “Tempted” and “Pulling Mussels from a Shell.“ One of the weirdest songs on the album was “Take Me, I’m Yours”:

Talk about a song beyond my years. (Where did I think I wanted someone to “take me”? To the mall?) The lyrics are romantic, if strange: “I’ve come across the desert to greet you with a smile / My camel looks so tired / It’s hardly worth my while…” But the overall vibe here is foreign, bizarre, a bit dangerous. There’s something James Bond-ish in that opening guitar line, something predatory about the driving synth beat. This song hinted that courtship was something exotic, perhaps a tiny bit like hunting – or being hunted – definitely involving a camel and probably requiring some seductive Eastern garb, perhaps some Scheherazade-style veils? I wasn’t sure, but I found it fascinating.

One of my favorites was (and is) “Goodbye Girl.”

It’s about a guy getting conned by a hooker, so… super-appropriate for an 8th grader. But it had a beachy, upbeat feel to it. Just hearing that little shaker would put me in a good mood as I listened to this charmer work her magic – “the room was almost spinning / she pulled another smile” – and wondered just what you were supposed to do if you woke up and realized the person you’d taken home the night before had stolen all your stuff. Did this happen often? Or was the theft a metaphor of some kind? Was there any way to detect a liar by sight and avoid being scammed, either literally or emotionally? Would I ever find the right color blue eyeliner? So many questions.

Speaking of perky-sounding songs with bummer lyrics, I also loved “Another Nail in My Heart.”

Somewhere in there seemed to be a warning about adult relationships: We will have good intentions, but we will probably fuck up at some point. “I want to be good / Is that not enough?” Well, I don’t know, I thought, is it? Does every relationship turn into “where-have-you-beens and far-away frowns”? Kind of depressing, I supposed, but catchy. Gotta love a downer song with an upper beat.

The one song I’d rewind and listen to a second time whenever I could (because of course I ended up borrowing the tape and making a mix out of it) was “Black Coffee in Bed.” It’s still my favorite.

At almost 13, I may not have been able to tell you where I’d be living or what I’d be doing or who I’d be with as a grownup, but I felt pretty sure that if my life were to bear any resemblance to a Squeeze song, it wouldn’t be Take Me, I’m Yours, what with all the peeled grapes and desert wandering. But this – “There’s a stain on my notebook / Where your coffee cup was / And there’s ash in the pages / Now I’ve got myself lost.” Writing letters to lovers late at night while lounging in bed and pounding coffee? That sounded like Adulthood with a capital A to me.

* * *

I still put that album on every now and then. I have yet to be stalked across the desert by a man on a camel, but I can confirm that my notebooks are indeed covered in coffee rings. Now I comprehend what these guys are singing about, but for a moment when I put the album on and those first notes play, it takes me back to what it was like not to know – to stare out the open window at a strange town flashing past, wondering about everything, my scrunch-moussed hair almost blowing in the wind.

♪♪♪

Mary Laura Philpott is an author, freelance writer, and occasional artist whose work has been featured in major media including The New York Times, The Tennessean, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Toast, and The Queen Latifah Show. She is the editor-in-chief of Musing, the online literary journal produced by Parnassus Books; the co-author, with JD DuPuy, of Poetic Justice: Legal Humor in Verse; and the creator of The Random Penguins tumblr. Most recently, she’s a contributor to the best-selling comedy collection, Moms Are Nuts (for which she also created the cover art). Contact: Twitter (@wheniblink) | Facebook (IMissYouWhenIBlink) | Instagram (TheRandomPenguins) | Blog (I Miss You When I Blink)