The Seldom Seen Kid
It’s a song that I love but every time I hear it
I have difficulty keeping it together.
For the longest time I couldn’t even
tell you what the song was about,
but I knew how it made me feel–
on the verge of shattering, I’d say,
especially when I tried to sing along
to the few lines I knew by heart.
Something about the mood of the piece,
the melody of the vocal, and the words,
reached into some deep place and shook.
I’m reading the lyrics now for maybe
the first time and I’m piecing it together.
We open with a description of roses
weighted down by rain, the image of a veil
and then pictures, photos, maybe in frames,
“the ones we belong to, caught and forever,”
the various ways people are captured
in photograph. That’s already the first two
verses. Then comes the third and last, the one
that destroys me every time. The entire lyric,
all three verses, or three stanzas, are
repeated twice through, so that third bit
destroys me twice. But even looking
at it now, it is just enigmatic enough
to leave open the door of interpretation.
Two characters are introduced, the first,
a woman the speaker is fond of–he calls
her “babe.” The second character is a man
or a boy who has never met the woman,
but in this verse the speaker imagines what
a meeting between them might have been like.
Conditional perfect. “And babe if you’d met him…”
I don’t know if I am writing a poem
or annotating a song lyric. I am trying to understand
why the thing moves me, why no matter
how many times I hear it, the effect is the same.
In this imagined scenario,
the man asks the woman to dance
and the speaker’s only way of competing
is to “stooge” for her laughter.
The last line of the song describes
the woman’s delight: “And you’d twirl
in a chaos of charm.”
If I understand the story of the song,
the veil of the rain on those roses
becomes a kind of metaphor,
the photographs another kind of veil,
one that must be lifted in order
to reveal a possibility of what could have been.
It’s not a song about regret, but of longing.
I don’t know why the speaker of the lyric
would have wanted things this way.
Whether he is in love with the woman
remains a mystery and why he would imagine
her dancing with a man she’s never met,
also a mystery. His relationship to the man,
a mystery. Why does this song bring me to tears?
A mystery. I only know that it does. Like magic.
Every single time.
michael jarmer 