first round

(6) The Killers, “Mr. Brightside”
ascended past
(11) DJ Sammy feat. Yanou & Do, “Heaven”
190-110
and will play in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/8/24.

A Song Is a Room Off the Hallway of Your Life: abigail oswald on the killers’ “mr. brightside”

Suppose you are in a mall, wandering its brightly lit expanse in search of some material object.
Suppose you are at a wedding reception, the dance floor aglow in the celebration of love.
Suppose you are driving through backroads, scanning the radio channels for a sound you recognize.
Suppose you are nervous in a claustrophobic waiting room, laughing in a neon skating rink, rapt in a pitch-black movie theater.
Suppose you are surrounded—just one of many, pulsing and alive and thoroughly flush with your own humanity.
Or, suppose you are alone.
In all of these places at all of these different times, the same song begins to play. The song varies from person to person; mine will always be a synthy three-and-half-minute anthem for the heartbroken.
The music opens a door, and in all these different moments, all these different versions of you walk through.

*

2024 marks the twenty-year anniversary of the release of Hot Fuss, the album that launched The Killers’ career. “Mr. Brightside” was The Killers’ debut single, one of the first songs the group wrote together, and the only song that survived the band’s complete overhaul of the album prompted by the release of The Strokes’ This Is It, marking a noted musical rivalry of the aughts.
The lyrics to “Mr. Brightside” detail a voyeuristic discovery of infidelity, the spool of a former love unraveling further with each line. The horrified narrator finds himself caught like an animal in a barbed wire of paranoia and lust, his feelings building to a crescendo with every mounting riff. In repeating the first verse, the song loops deliberately through this betrayal, a jealous mind twisting in the trap of its own nightmarish revelations.
“Mr. Brightside” is also a true story, grounded in frontman Brandon Flowers’ own youthful experience discovering his girlfriend in a Vegas pub with another man. In this way the song is a moment suspended in time, amber for a woman immortalized. Flowers’ discovery continues to occur in perpetuity, live in a club or through a playlist or on a radio station at any given moment.
Over the years I have wondered how it feels returning to this heartbreak on a stage every night, over and over again. But then, I think—what a triumph, to transform an experience like that into the biggest success of your lifetime. Telling your story with words that so many learn by heart.
“It’s just a song about betrayal,” Flowers has since said. “How I was betrayed. And I was able to turn it into a masterpiece.”
There’s a fundamental artistic impulse buried there—your heart has been broken, and then the next thought: Can I turn this pain into something else?
 Maybe the act of creation doesn’t reverse the hurt. It certainly doesn’t erase it. But damn if you haven’t reclaimed it as something beautiful. 

*

At the time of this writing, The Killers have played “Mr. Brightside” live 995 times. Flowers has also said he never gets bored of singing it. No matter how much time passes, no matter how much changes, no matter how many albums The Killers release, he can always return to the very beginning. Time collapses at every live show. The song is a reminder that nothing has changed, but also everything has changed. In my favorite live performance recordings, Flowers sparkles. Dressed in rhinestones, dressed in gold. Smiling as he sings.
There are shows where the crowd belts the chorus just as loud as its creator. In these moments it feels as if the song was always meant to be a duet with the audience. A stadium psalm, an anthem destined for a teeming arena.
A song is a gift first given to the listener. If you love it, and you’re lucky, there might be a handful of nights in your life that you get to give it back.

* 

Googling “Mr. Brightside” today generates over four million exact matches online. On Spotify, results for “Mr. Brightside” cap at the search function’s limit of 1,000. A playlist of these results would run for 62 hours and 10 minutes. If you wanted, you could listen to these many Brightsides for two-and-a-half days straight. In twenty years it is impossible to estimate the number of hours people have danced to this song about a single devastating revelation from one man’s life.
Yes, the words are everything. But also, somehow, the words are entirely incidental. Eventually a song takes on a life of its own. Each listener attaches their own meaning and memories. What was happening in the background, the way you felt when you pressed play. More often than not, we make our own meaning. In rare instances a song transcends the boundaries of language, spinning beyond sensation into pure being.
“I think that’s the reason the song has persisted,” Flowers once said. “Because it’s real.”

*

In my life, there was a particular box I carried with me through every single move. It was full of things my younger self had deemed valuable, and I had kept it safe for years. But this was the year my safeguards failed, and water finally found its way beneath the box’s lid.
Everything in the box mattered to me, still, even though sifting through the waterlogged contents as an adult I could see that these were mostly silly things, small things, things a young girl would call important: A plastic bottle cap with a message written across the top in black marker. A metallic blue souvenir pen with my name printed on its barrel. My very first library card.
As I rummaged through to see what I could salvage, I unearthed my old iPod, water shifting behind its screen. A knot tightened in my stomach, and for an instant I felt as if I was holding a broken time machine in my hands. It was as if the device itself contained the only sonic tunnel back to my adolescence, so holding the view of every backseat car window, every bus trip, every long ride home. I remembered carefully cultivating my precious lists of songs, the files like small treasures I had discovered and made my own. When I looked down at this small magic shape, at a certain angle I thought I could almost see my younger self reflected in the empty screen.
But in the end, the device we use to listen is just a tally of play counts, a channel, a brief repository. The song itself is not an object that can be destroyed, because it is, in fact, a place—one which exists outside of time. A song is a room off the hallway of your life. And wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, the simple recognition of those opening riffs will always feel like coming home.

*

How many times has your song stopped you in your tracks? At the supermarket, at a party, in a cab. You might be in the middle of a conversation and suddenly the moment splinters; as simple as that, you are somewhere else.
If a song truly matters to you, you will spend your life returning to it. No matter how much time passes, no matter how much changes, the door is always there.

Abigail Oswald writes about art, fame, and connection. Her work has appeared in places like Best Microfiction, Catapult, Bright Wall/Dark Room, DIAGRAM, Memoir Mixtapes, The Rumpus, and a memory vending machine. She's also the author of Microfascination, a newsletter on pop culture rabbit holes. More online at abigailwashere.com. 

That Road Before: DJ Sammy’s “Heaven” by Michael A. Van Kerckhove  

Meeting my ex-husband in late 2001 ensured that despite my Roscoe’s dance floor days basically ending with the flick of a meet cute, my dance—and to some degree pop—music education would continue. Roscoe’s was my “homo away from home” bar in Chicago’s Boystown for my first few years here. That is from 1998 until that fateful day in October when we met at our local indie bookstore where I was perusing print porn and he was purchasing the new issue of American Theatre magazine. Snarky comments were thrown from both sides.
After twenty minutes I gave him one of my home-printed perforated playwright business cards with my phone number. He did not give me his card, if he even had one. Though if he had, I would have kept it with my collection of Roscoe’s cards taken from stacks scattered throughout the bar, names and numbers written with golf pencils in the days when cell phones were much less prolific.
Roscoe’s was where I met new friends and crushes and hookups and experienced big city gay life. Where I also stayed in touch with current dance music, both on the back dance floor and the video monitors up front. A continuation of my 90s dance music exposure began in college at The Zoo (RIP) outside Kalamazoo, Michigan. Before Cher believed, she was one by one. Before Deborah Cox told us no one was supposed to be here, Culture Beat was calling Mr. Vain. This all bled into the early 2000s of course, and in thinking about the dance music of those early Chicago years, I had to confirm the release dates, so much of it riding the cusp between millennia.
In this inbetween-ness, it makes sense that I am drawn to DJ Sammy’s dance rendition of Bryan Adams’ “Heaven” as it fits so perfectly into this era—much like my alternative music tastes generally hug the 80s and 90s from junior high into early college. The sound, the arrangement, the song’s rise and climax, that spacey tone of the keyboards that lets us know when exactly we are. This is my dance music. I would have totally lived to “Heaven” while clutching a rum and Coke on the Roscoe’s dance floor, green laser lights bouncing off the disco balls, red and blue lights piercing the haze. Or watched/glanced at the video up front while sipping my nth Citron & tonic and gossiping with a friend or trying to flirt with a stranger.
But I never did.
“Heaven” as a single was released in November 2001, a month into mine and my husband’s relationship. And DJ Sammy’s album Heaven, which also features the lesser (to me) 80s cover of Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer,” was released in August 2002. While we did spend time at the gayborhood bars, I no longer needed to rush to Roscoe’s after a Friday night shift at my downtown restaurant job or experience any kind of Saturday night FOMO, as, well, I’d achieved part of the point of spending so much time there—finding a goddamn boyfriend! Happy to spend those nights instead in his studio apartment with a Pan Contract #2 pizza and free bottle of ginger ale from Godfathers (RIP), a bottle of Yellow Tale Merlot, and Trading Spaces or Sex and the City as he had the big boy bed and the (oops!) free cable.
So, I lost my primary blood source for new dance music. I was good on Madison Avenue and Alice DeeJay and Amber and the various Spice Girls solo singles. (I’m looking at you, Mel C’s “I Turn to You.”) But then I was given a new source: the collection of early relationship mix CDs curated with love by my husband, featuring dance, pop, show tunes, and more. Some of these songs are hard to listen to now if they come up on shuffle in the time capsule that is my iTunes “Big Mix.” (I’m looking at you, Westlife’s “World of Our Own.”) A later CD opens with “Heaven” and closes with the complementary Lenny Kravitz hit “Let Love Rule.” Highlights in between include Dirty Vegas’s “Days Go By,” Megan Mullally’s “Real Emotional Girl,” Justin Timberlake’s “Like I Love You,” “Without Love” from Hairspray, and Christina Aguilera’s iconic “Beautiful,” which we first experienced together by way of the song’s video on his aforementioned free cable.

*

Before Bryan Adams’ song was a number one smash hit from his 1984 Reckless album, it appeared on the soundtrack to A Night in Heaven, a trashy 1983 deep cut starring Lesley Ann Warren and the barely legal heartthrob of Blue Lagoon, Christopher Atkins. Thankfully, Adams (or one of his people) rescued the song from languishing in this strip club and adultery fueled mess where it doesn’t even appear in any scenes set in the club baring its name (though a pre-Animotion “Obsession” certainly does!)
Adams’ version is a beautiful if sentimental 80s ballad conjuring as-confident-as-possible junior high and high school slow dances or swaying in our concert seats, lighters (that we only had for concerts!) held high. Too young to imagine growing old with someone while still trying to be grown up. DJ Sammy takes us from the school gym to the club dance floor, a little older and in theory wiser. Sentimentality turns into celebration, swaying into trance. With friends or a significant other or stranger. Or listening alone on a DiscMan to a message from your boyfriend/future husband that our younger and wilder individual selves are becoming an Us, warm in our present, dancing into a Together that, like Heaven, is supposed to last forever.
If DJ Sammy’s record takes us from the school gym to the club, then the accompanying music video takes us from Adams’ concert halls (with either people or video monitors with people in the audience, depending on which version you click on YouTube) to a dance floor fantasia where we are free and safe to live and be ourselves. Dark dreamy moonlit skies with rolling clouds and bright stars. Buildings and rooms with green, blue, dark orange lit windows.
At the heart of the cast of characters accompanying us on our journey is the heterosexual couple and their kids following the lyrical story. A simple enough story, allowing for each of us watching or listening or swaying or dancing to view our own lives through its lens, swapping out genders and situations as needed. One half of a couple somewhere older than their “younger years” reflects on their relationship. They had wild youthful times. They overcame problems that almost tore them apart. And the narrator realizes that the other is all they have needed, do need, and will need. Past, present, future. No matter what happens next, their love will see them through. It’s a one true soul mate situation. Which is cozy and wonderful and optimistic, especially for a pop song or a rom-com. If not always reality.
This couple is our stand-in, surrounded by a sort of Alice in Wonderland ensemble showing us the way: the Black man with dreads wearing a plaid suit, a symbol whose meaning I have yet to figure out tattooed on his hand; the dark skinned boy caked in white body makeup, pale dots on his bare chest and a red scarf around his head; the young woman offering us the ball of light (a ball of hope?) she holds in her hand; the woman clad in draped white fabric walking a wide runway flanked by large beamed structures. Then there are the two Asian girls, possibly sisters, in dark red dresses and dark red lips on white made-up faces with blushed cheeks in a snow filled room. They take in what’s going on in the rest of this world and in our lives; they look into the camera and whisper into each other’s ears, unraveling our mysteries. And of course, there are close-ups of the angelic Dominique Rijpma van Hulst (BKA “Do”) singing, smiling, and smizing into the camera. Peppered with flashes of DJ Sammy himself.
I don’t know what they are all supposed to specifically represent beyond atmospheric dance video tropes if anything. But I feel they are at least there to root for us, celebrate us, encourage us as a series of title cards flashes by: Seeing each other / Can be / Painful / But / Healing too. Ask yourself / Why there is no / Freedom / In your room. Only you / Judge / No fear/ Be yourself.

*

So now here’s the part of the essay where in theory I should break down the song’s lyrics and draw comparison and contrast to my own life and our relationship. Yet I go into it wary of the balance between a good story for you, a healing experience for myself, and how much if anything I should say at all. But I will give it a mindful try.
There was only you and me; we were young and wild and free: Both of us in our mid-twenties when we met, younger years compared to now’s approach into our fifties. At the time you could say our wildest days individually were behind us. Though there were still late nights; drinking with friends before certain tolerances began to break down in our (okay my) thirties. And Friday nights found me fading fast on our couch. Our responsibilities included each other, work, grad school, and our art, with our families five hours away in smaller doses. As for kids, well, we did reach a brief sort of almost that my various demons and fears shot down, where they then eventually landed in a jagged cloud of regret and relief.
Now nothin’ can take you away from me; we’ve been down that road before… To each their own timeline. And what takes people away from each other can be something major but also smaller things that add up along the way until one or both finds themselves in a place where decisions must be made.
It’s here, isolated in this lyric, where I find the heart of the song: that road before.
That road before: A journey we went on, the good and the bad. We left Chicago twice. Maybe you also left with excellent reason the place where you had moved to on your own once upon a time to find yourself, pursue your dreams, to live free. Maybe you also didn’t always handle the situation well despite a good foundation and the promise of new and beautiful adventures ahead.
Baby, you’re all that I want when you’re lyin’ here in my arms; I’m finding it hard to believe we’re in Heaven…. There is this natural disbelief that we can and do achieve this concept, place, state of being we’ve grown up striving for all our lives. A spiritual entity activated in popular music from “Pennies from Heaven” to “Stairway to Heaven” to “Just Like Heaven” and before and beyond. This joy, peace, happiness, ecstasy—or a place that is only promised (with caveats) after death, but we’ve somehow reached it early. Score for us.
And love is all that I need; and I found it there in your heart: Is it love or the person that we need most? Or are they inseparable like we need water and whatever vessel contains it for survival?
It isn’t too hard to see we’re in Heaven: The complex inner journey from disbelief to acceptance, full of twists and turns and doubts and fears and anxieties. See that road creeping up in here? We are full of conflicting wants and desires and as yet manifested truths and identities.
Oh, once in your life you find someone who will turn your world around, bring you up when you’re feelin’ down…. He did turn my world around. Showed me things, shared things. Travel and adventures and art and experiences. He took care of me even when it was hard. Until he understandably could not anymore.
Yeah, nothin’ could change what you mean to me: He still means the world to me, even if that world is now a more distant planet. I cherish every moment and adventure and all he did for me and what I hope I did for him. Maybe I wrote this whole thing just to tell him this.
Oh, there’s lots that I could say, but just hold me now ‘cause our love will light the way…I haven’t said everything. I haven’t said enough. Maybe I’ve said too much.  So, in the silences, I’ll think about us holding each other. At night, on the couch, or in the middle of our kitchens in our various homes: five total, six if you count that studio apartment of his with that big boy bed and free cable—our first Heaven.

*

That road before looks into the future: that road before us. We ride off into the sunset together; or the road is forked into our separate ways. We make those decisions and more decisions based on decisions and so on. A little over a year after we left Chicago the second time, I packed up my mix CDs and other artifacts of our relationship and everything that was mine and a few things that were ours that he gave me and a few I just decided were mine. And I moved back on my own. I could have stayed where we were. But without him it wasn’t home anymore.
That road is an attempt, either new or repeated with educated adjustment: Back where I started but with a generation’s worth of experience in hand. And a cell phone! And the connective technology therein. Reconnection, new connections, a new neighborhood, my second solo Chicago apartment. New adventures and rebooted wilder days, repeated patterns and behaviors, middle-aged stubbornness and particularities (or just me), always demons and fears to slay.
That road before me now: nearly six years since moving back. Stories not simple enough for pop songs. Past, future, teetering between the two in the present. Unsure of my definition of Heaven.
In the song and video’s bridge, Do sings I’ve been waitin’ for so long; For somethin’ to arrive; for love to come along…. So many nights sitting on my college house front porch, smoking clove cigarettes and laughingly whining with my housemates, “I need me a maaaan….” So many Roscoe’s crushes and maybes and almosts. Until dreams came true when and where we both least expected it.
As Do finishes one more spin around the chorus, the Asian sisters in the video excitedly nod to each other and then turn to us, the younger girl’s missing toothed grin soothing us. They smile, wave, and nod, sending us off on our road, believing we’ll be okay. That I’ll be okay. That there will be more good times and bad. And that it’s okay if the one who was standing there by me for so long isn’t anymore. Because there are so many beautiful others who have stood by me, will stand by me, are standing by me, all in a Heaven of our own making.

Michael A. Van Kerckhove is a writer and performer in Chicago. He last appeared in March Xness with his March Faxness extracurricular essay Weights & Pulleys about Cry Cry Cry's cover of REM's "Fall on Me." He is active in Chicago's vibrant live lit community and has told stories in shows across the city, most recently in CHIRP Radio's The First Time series. Visit MichaelVanKerckhove.com for more. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, and Blue Sky @mvankerckhove and/or his sorely neglected TikTok @GenXScorpio.