2/6/14

Have You Heard? SIMPLE MINDS "Someone Somewhere In Summertime" [1982]

Fired up Spotify this morning and among the suggestions on the Discover screen was this one, right in the dead center of the screen:
You haven't listened to "Someone Somewhere (In Summertime)" in a while.  Would you like to play it now?
Your boy HERC clicked the link and has been listening to the same damn song, the six minute extended version of the song, for most of the day. (There was a brief aborted attempt to sit through Boogie Nights but he just couldn't do it, not today.)
Stay, I'm burning slow
With me in the rain, walking in the soft rain
Calling out my name
See me burning slow
The music heard during the song's beginning and through the first verse is evocative of a soft, rhythmic rain.  It sets the melancholy mood quite nicely.
Brilliant days, wake up on brilliant days
Shadows of brilliant ways will change all the time
Memories, burning gold memories
Gold of day memories change me in these times
Using the power of repetition of two key words (brilliant and memories) singer and lyricist Jim Kerr brightens things up a bit before going into full hopeless romantic mode on the next part.
Somewhere there is some place, that one million eyes can't see
And somewhere there is someone, who can see what I can see
And with those two lines, what had started off as a somewhat sad sounding song was now a quiet triumphant anthem for romantic dreamers everywhere not just somewhere.
Someone, Somewhere In Summertime
Someone, Somewhere In Summertime
Someone, Somewhere In Summertime
A simple, alliterative chorus where Jim reads each line differently, giving gravitas to each before he takes back down a notch in the next stanza.
Moments burn, slow burning golden nights
Once more see city lights, holding candles to the flame
Brilliant days, wake up on brilliant days
Shadows of brilliant ways will change me all the time
The word brilliant is used again, this time coupled with the word burn from the first verse.  The imagery is a bit off but we really don't care because we know that chorus will be around again soon, soothing our savage souls.
Somewhere there is some place, that one million eyes can't see
And somewhere there is someone, who can see what I can see
Someone, Somewhere In Summertime
Someone, Somewhere In Summertime
Someone, Somewhere In Summertime
Someone, Somewhere In Summertime
Someone, Somewhere In Summertime
HERC first heard this song on the radio late on a Sunday night in 1982; it was probably on the New Music Test Department, which only a few weeks earlier had introduced him to Prince's "Little Red Corvette".  By Tuesday he had purchased the album and dubbed it onto a TDK SA90, putting it on both sides as it filled up the forty-five minutes per side perfectly.  


By this time (early December 1982), the single had been out nearly a month while the album had been on shelves since September.  The single failed to chart here in the US but the album cracked the upper half of the Top 200.  For the Winter of 1982/1983, that album New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) was battling Prince's 1999 for #1 on HERC's most played chart.  The initial copy of the album HERC bought turned out to be a limited special edition marble colored vinyl so he bought another copy of the album (which turned out to be the standard black vinyl) so he could have one to play.  He still has the colored vinyl but gave away the regular black vinyl copy to a girl he wooed.


What the sixteen year old HERC loved about the song is what the near fifty year old HERC loves about the song: the soft, shimmery backing track that accompanies the hopeful and romantic poem lyrics.  Seeing Simple Minds live on stage, performing this song, a few years after they became big in America (circa 1985) and were accused of adopting U2's style (which in truth was the other way around), HERC was reduced to a solitary, smoldering soul amidst a sea of 15,000 BIC flickers.

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