The song was too slow, it was too long, and yet it moved us and like the best pop songs it was an abstraction, poetry that could mean anything to anyone—it was a launching pad for our separate longings but it was obviously a metaphor about loss, and this was something all of us shared, whether it was the pain Thom Wright’s parents’ divorce caused him, with the father he was closer to now long gone across the continent, or the alcoholism that was destroying Jeff Taylor’s father, or my own defeats tied to the actor I often played and didn’t want to and who my own father still ignored even as I
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