There’s a lot of car time out here in these rural parts. I don’t mind, as for a long time, even before I lived up here, my best thinking usually happened in the car. Sometimes it was the only alone, quiet time I got so I took it.
But I also really like to listen to the radio. And sometimes I get lucky. Today on Radio Woodstock I got to hear, for the second time in as many weeks, a song I love and hadn’t heard in years. Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler’s just-this-side-of-Tom Waits growl and poetry with their rendering of Romeo and Juliet. If you don’t know it, watch the 1980 video and listen here.
When I was 22 and wandering London I had at least a half dozen Dire Straits cassettes I played on a loop in my Walkman (yeah I know, flashback).
This song has a lot of really, really good lines.
One in particular grabs my poetic sense of time and space and love:
And all I do is miss you and the way we used to be/All I do is keep the beat, the bad company/All I do is kiss you, through the bars of a rhyme/Julie, I’d do the stars with you, any time
Language is so supple, and surprising, and endlessly able to express our humanness if we let it. Combined with this level of music and crying guitar, there’s no match. It jumps right out of the radio, shakes us up, and puts us back down, a little better off to go on down the road, thinking and listening.