I’ve been listening to that song a lot lately. And watching the video; the video adds whole new layers of meaning that I didn’t know were there, as a good music video should. The ghosts of those teens looking through the passing freight train at the grown man as he’s clearly remembering when he was them really drives something home to this particular middle-aged small town boy.
(By the way, I think it’s kind of funny that “twenty years” after eighteen – i.e., thirty-eight – seems to be the default age for songs like this, where the singer is lost in bittersweet memory about their long-ago youth. I’m almost five years past thirty-eight myself, and of course Bob Seger is way past it by now. Thirty-eight doesn’t seem that old. But I suppose twenty years is a nice medium number when you’re talking a human time scale, where ten years isn’t enough to even realize that time is passing and thirty makes it ancient history. Twenty years is when you realize that time really has passed, that the world has changed and so have you, that you really aren’t young anymore, not like you were back then, and you’ve actually been dealing with adult things – good and bad – for some time now, and you’re past the scrambling-to-survive stage and maybe have a few moments to count the cost.)
Continue reading “Sweating In The Sun”