second round
(14) Amerie, “1 Thing”
shook down
(6) The Killers, “Mr. Brightside”
359-178
and will play in the sweet 16
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 at the end of regulation, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/15/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)
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.
SERIOUS JOY: SEJAL SHAH ON AMERIE’S “1 THING”
This one thing, but I’m not telling you what it is—and it’s the secret ingredient in the secret sauce—the secret ingredient is what makes the secret house. I looked it up, the lyrics, and what Wikipedia says, but with music, it’s how it makes you feel, not what others say about it. Still, here are a few things I want to say about Amerie’s “1 Thing”:
What I remember is dancing to this song in the house in the northeastern corner of Iowa, the driftless area, I rented for the academic year from a professor who was away in Copenhagen and in their little buttercream-colored house I danced at night. I was lonely. Nah nah nah nah nah oh (uh-uh). Was I going to find an academic job? It’s this 1 thing that got me trippin’. Is an academic job the way to happiness or a book? This one thing you did. For me it was neither, but I didn’t know that at the time. This one thing I want to admit it. I was dating the professor’s younger son. Ooh-wee, it felt so serious. I had also been out on some dates with a painter/chef at the local bistro. This one thing and I was so with it. It was hard to figure out. This was a town of 8,000. Blink and 20 years go by. Nah nah nah nah nah oh. Days go by. That was another song I was thinking about. What gets you tripping? The past is a head trip.
This one thing—what is it that makes a person right for another person? What’s the thing that makes a relationship last? What’s the thing that you can’t get over? And it’s exactly what I would say is not working in a student poem or story. Or one of mine. Here’s what I would write: “Thing” lacks specificity. It’s a thing. Can you be more specific? And yet, there is something about the thinginess of a thing. What’s your thing? What’s mine?
LOOKING AT SOME OF THE LYRICS:
Trying to let it go
(this is me, in everything I write, this one thing, trying to let something go)
This one thing, your soul made me feel it
(What thing is it?)
Hey, we don’t know each other well
(No, that’s what makes it interesting)
Memories just keep ringing bells
(a song unhooks those memories, unfastens them, silvers them, sounds them)
I’m hoping you can keep a secret
(What’s the secret except this 1 thing?)
This one thing you did—when it’s something that someone has done to me, it has the whiff of the unforgiveable. But what if no one did anything and dancing is only another way to write?
While working on my story collection, I found myself listening to songs on repeat and dancing alone again in my house—it was the pandemic- and who could have imagined this one thing that kept us afraid and apart was also this one thing that drew us together as we tried to figure out what the next best step was.
I danced once to “Days Go By.” This is an essay, though, about “1 Thing.” I danced to many songs including “1 Thing.” This 1 thing I want to admit it.
Amerie singing at the top of the hill and I sat and danced in the yellow house on the hill, wondering what one thing it would be—a job or a person or event waiting to happen, which would give my life direction, a ballast. Things did happen. I got a job in New York. I didn’t marry either the painter/chef or my landlord’s son (also a painter), though he said he would have. I didn’t realize for a long time that he was serious (the landlord’s son). It’s not that I wasn’t serious, it’s just that I didn’t think of myself as having that 1 thing for someone else, being that it was easier to be aware of that 1 thing in someone else.
I didn’t realize for a long time how much I admired painters. This one thing and I was so with it. They say if you admire it then you should try it. I’ve been trying (this one thing) painting some watercolors. I didn’t get tenure. The times we never even got to speak. I left New York.
It took me a long time to see this one thing is whatever you make it. I couldn’t find it outside of myself. The song always surprised me, made me wonder—what is everyone else thinking the one thing is? Or is it just the hook and the beat and the danceability of it and no one really cares what that 1 thing is or is it that there’s some mystery and anyone can fill it—magic, that you are a painter or a chef or a 6’1” teacher or that dancing alone in a house on a hill can bring you some magic and that can be the one thing that keeps you going when you don’t know what comes next in your life—and let’s be real not one of us does. Dancing can keep you going when you are writing a book, and you don’t know if someone is going to ever publish it. It’s a romance. I did marry. Not the chef-painter, not my landlord’s son, but a middle school teacher, years later. He coaches tennis and champions my writing. What is the 1 thing? It’s the turning toward each other instead of turning away when it gets harder. I think that’s the 1 thing. That’s a thing, anyway.
What are some things I will remember?
Dancing at night in the house, before there was wi-fi so I was near my laptop, which was plugged in.
Oh, been trying to let it go
Why is it so hard to let anything go?
Trying to keep my eyes close
Should it be closed?
Trying to keep it just like before
Before, before, I can see before (painter/chef)
The times we never even got to speak
The time before you know it’s going to work out with someone—
Don't wanna tell you what it is
Then when you know when it’s not going to work out, no matter how much you want it.
Do you even know what that 1 thing is?
I’m here to argue that we don’t. We just come up with reasons after—
Ooh-wee, it felt so serious
These things are serious! Even dancing alone is serious, because dancing is serious joy—
Got me thinking just too much
What is writing, but a different way of thinking?
They, we, are all of us married now. One to a psychiatrist, one I don’t know.
Na na na na oh (uh-uh).
I am writing this essay about a song, about how there was some joy in dancing even when lonely. More than writing a book, but if you are dancing while writing a book
Hear voices I don't wanna understand
Here I am talking about some thing
My car keys are jingling in my hand
Here I am telling you a story about two painters and a story collection
My high heels are clicking towards your door
And a tennis coach. It wasn’t a door, the way out is always on the dance floor, dancing, or toward a window, your eyes looking up
It's this one thing that got me trippin' (you did)
This one thing and I was so with it
Dancing with myself on a January night, not knowing what comes next, not knowing what the 1 thing was til I became the 1 thing
Trying to keep it just like before
There is no going back, but there’s always dancing, let me say that’s one thing that won’t forsake you.
Dancing is the secret house, is the way to write your secret book, is the way to make it real.
Sejal Shah is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Her debut story collection, How to Make Your Mother Cry: fictions, is forthcoming from West Virginia University Press on May 1st, 2024. This hybrid book came together through a lot of dancing. Her essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, was a university common read, an NPR Best Book of 2020, and named in over thirty most-anticipated or best-of lists including Lit Hub, the Los Angeles Times, and PEN America. She lives in Rochester, New York. You can find her online @sejalshahwrites.