second round
(8) When in Rome, “The Promise”
TOOK DOWN
(16) Marshall Crenshaw, “Someday, Someway”
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SWEET 16
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/16/23.
BETH NGUYEN ON “THE PROMISE”
In 1988, a British group called When in Rome released “The Promise,” a dance song that would become a one-hit wonder in the United States, establishing the band’s fame and later tearing them apart; a song that would resurge in the mid-aughts due to a popular movie, and again more recently on TikTok; a song that my middle-schooler self listened to on WGRD and WKLQ in suburban west Michigan, having no idea that she would end up hearing it forever, on “yesterday’s hits” radio stations while driving, sometimes catching those opening piano notes, one day wondering what was really being promised, and what had ever been fulfilled.
I am a child of the 80s who earnestly loves that decade’s music. For me, one-hit wonders endure because they are wonders. There’s a sense of newness, or renewal, every time. To hear “The Promise” is to feel a succinct, compact joy—no obligations, no strings. That bracing temporary clarity is what I want when I try to make sense of my childhood, my adolescence, the long past that keeps getting longer.
As a kid who felt like an outsider, I deeply related to the anxiety of the line I’m sorry but I’m just thinking of the right words to say, and how the lead singer pronounced sorry in a way that sounded like sore-y to my American ears. I guess I thought the song was romantic. It even had what I later learned was a zeugma: when your day is through and so is your temper. Surely the chorus’s I’ll make you fall for me was the promise of love. I figured, it was good to have such decisive goals.
But last year, after I decided to write about this song, I looked up the music video on Youtube. I had completely forgotten it: how the three melancholy band members hang around what seems to be an English cottage while a beautiful, unhappy woman leaves. We get some gorgeous hair flipping, but there’s no interaction between the band and the woman, just the camera’s gaze in motion. It’s humorless, a contrast to the song’s new wave synth pop. No dancing, and plenty of tension.
From what I can tell from interviews, articles, and court documents online, the band broke up not long after “The Promise.” At some point the keyboardist trademarked the name “When in Rome,” the other two members of the group started touring as “When in Rome UK,” and the keyboardist sued. They’ve had chances for reconciliation, like when the song was featured in Napoleon Dynamite, but maybe there’s just too much animus, too much history. Too much thinking of the right words to say.
In 1988 I was a kid who didn’t question “The Promise.” Didn’t question a lot of things. Instead, I was sympathetic when the singer explained, Sometimes if I shout it’s not what’s intended. These words just come out. I had no concerns when he said, I’ll make you fall for me. Thirty-five years later, in 2023, I think about how quickly the speaker excuses himself for shouting. I think about the construction of the line I’ll make you fall for me. In 2023, the song sounds less like a promise and more of a threat.
Maybe most relationships, and therefore maybe most love songs, are about power. Having it, wanting it, losing it. Or maybe this is the constant consequence of getting on in years, of being Gen X, of being a child of the 1980s. The songs of our own lives turn on us, making us second guess who we were, what we believed, what it all made us become. Like any text, the words of “The Promise” stay the same but the meaning changes shape because we, the readers and listeners, change. We critique the lives we have lived in order to keep going. We are always rereading our selves, our former selves, and realizing how much was fucked up. The promise that becomes a threat—isn’t that just what it is to grow up, to enter into different phases of life that you couldn’t have understood were waiting for you? Maybe the hallmark of the one-hit wonder is its perpetual promise.
On Youtube, someone named elflingskitten saunders commented: “I remember being a teenager in 1988, we were very poor and they were about to shut off our electric. I heard this for the first time then while standing in our driveway and just being overcome by the feelings of hope and joy this song gave me. Almost 35 years later and it’s still possibly my favorite song ever.”
Last fall, driving home to Madison, Wisconsin after a brief trip to Iowa City, I was listening to “The Promise” when I saw a car parked on the side of the highway near the wooden, Wisconsin-shaped welcome sign at the border. Four young women were climbing a hill to reach it. They were laughing and calling to each other, phones ready for pictures. I wondered if they were on their way to the start of the semester. Or were they traveling farther, on a road trip documenting each arrival at each state? I’ll never know, but I will remember the glimpse of their laughter, the way they held out their arms. In my car, my own phone was playing When in Rome, its name taken from an idiom about conformity and manners, traceable to 4th century St. Ambrose by way of famous confessor St. Augustine. I promise. I promise you. I want to say to that person on Youtube who remembered standing in the driveway, overcome with feeling—oh my god, I so get what you mean. Everything moves so fast. The song, the image at the side of the road. Who we were, listening and singing and dancing along. Who we imagined we would be. And not once does “The Promise” ever use the word love.
Beth Nguyen’s next book is a memoir titled Owner of a Lonely Heart (Scribner, July 2023) and she hopes that it will indeed be much better than being an owner of a broken heart. She also teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and listens to 80s music without shame.
jessica handler on “someday, someway”
Stop what you’re doing right now and cue this baby up. It will only take about three minutes of your time, the length of a standard radio pop hit. Because that’s what it is. A power-pop hit.
Now that you’re listening, you’re dancing a little, right? Maybe nodding along or tapping your fingers, because this is so catchy that you can’t not. Yep. Same here. That’s the magic of power pop. You might be a little embarrassed, because your taste normally goes elsewhere (sure, of course it does), but look at you, digging it.
Granted, I’ve given you a link to Marshall Crenshaw’s performance of “Someday, Someway” on a 1982 episode of the David Letterman show, so it’s from the universe of big hair and shoulder pads. Crenshaw’s performance swings, but Letterman’s approach is cringeworthy. He has the same “what are those crazy kids up to now?” grimace that Sullivan had introducing The Beatles to a television audience nearly two decades prior. Never mind the host, though, because Crenshaw’s trio gives it their all. Before the second verse, Crenshaw turns to grin at his band. He closes out the number with a thumbs up to the studio audience. Take that, Dave.
Crenshaw’s earnest, clear vocals ride above Chris Donato’s gleeful, melodic bass line (mixed super-high on the Letterman performance, less so on the album.) The drummer, Crenshaw’s brother Robert, drives the song in the way that the best drummers do; you think it’s simple until you (okay, me) sit down at your kit and try it yourself. And how much fun is a song with hand claps? (Very.) When Crenshaw sings, “I can't stand to see you sad, I can't bear to hear you cry” we hold in our hearts the idea of someone we love saying those very words to us.
The lyrics are a plea for connection, for being desperate to do it right. Crenshaw explained in a 2013 PBS interview that the song is about “the beginnings of marriage, [when] you realize you’ve signed up for something permanent.”
The first time “Someday, Someway,” knocked me out was in 1982, when it was a radio hit. I didn’t see the Letterman appearance at the time (I found that for you while writing this essay, so you’re welcome.) Power-pop gets me where I live. Consider The Beatles as Exhibit A in the power-pop pantheon. They started out playing skiffle, then got famous with power pop, then went psychedelic, then went their own ways. Power pop for the win.
“Someday, Someway” reached the #36 spot on the Billboard chart in August of 1982, and stayed on that chart for eleven weeks. In September, the song was above the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me?” and below Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” on the Cashbox Top 100 singles. Crenshaw, who had just left two years of performing as John Lennon in the stage show Beatlemania (feel free to start connecting the thematic dots here) later said of “Someday, Someway” that the song meant something to him.
He got lucky. Rockabilly monster Robert Gordon recorded a cover that, Crenshaw notes in that same PBS interview, “got a lot of airplay.” And Crenshaw’s original, released after the Gordon cover, got a lot of airplay, too.
I prefer Crenshaw’s version; it just feels better.
We have to talk about rockabilly for a minute here. Would a listener comprehend the genetic makeup of “Someday, Someway” if they didn’t already have Buddy Holly or Gene Vincent in their soul? Does it matter? Fundamentally, no. A wise-ass music nerd (waves hand from the back of the classroom) feels smarter, more equipped somehow, to get the song, but a good song is at its heart just a good song. I wonder, though, if “Someday, Someway” resonates differently if you already have rockabilly in your system. You know, the jittery, chittery feel, and Holly’s ‘hiccup’ vocal style? Crenshaw played Buddy Holly — sounding wonderfully like Marshall Crenshaw — in the 1987 film La Bamba (keep connecting those dots.) “Someday, Someway” is, structurally, Crenshaw’s homage to “Lotta Lovin’” by Gene Vincent. And The Beatles, of course, started life as the leather-jacketed, greasy-pompadoured Quarrymen. (How are those dots coming along?) No less an expert than Billy Bragg, in his authoritative book, “Roots, Radicals, and Rockers” calls skiffle and rockabilly “exact contemporaries.”
Someone told me once that when a person hears a pop song, they either imagine themselves singing it or imagine themselves the person to whom the song is being sung. With “Someday, Someway,” which one am I? Depends on the day. I contain multitudes.
I was twenty-two when I first heard “Someday, Someway.” My twenties were ostensibly a time of big fun, of sometimes pretending to have big fun, and definitely an ongoing quest for big fun (how else do I explain the late nights and early mornings at the Cathay de Grande club in the seediest part of seedy Hollywood, or the backyard parties where at least one friend wore coconut shell halves as a brassiere? There is, however, no good explanation for my owning more than a single pair of winklepickers.) My twenties, and likely yours, too, were secretly a search for that permanence, for someone who “will love you for my whole life through.”
And that’s the power in the pop of Marshall Crenshaw’s “Someday, Someway.” Singing it or being sung to, maybe it understands you.
Jessica Handler is the author of the novel The Magnetic Girl, winner of the 2020 Southern Book Prize and a nominee for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. The novel is one of the 2019 “Books All Georgians Should Read,” an Indie Next pick, Wall Street Journal Spring 2019 pick, Bitter Southerner Summer 2019 pick, and a Southern Independent Bookseller’s Association “Okra Pick.” Her memoir, Invisible Sisters, was also named one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read,” and her craft guide Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss was praised by Vanity Fair magazine. Her writing has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, The Bitter Southerner, Electric Literature, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Oldster, Full Grown People, and March Plaidness. She lives in Atlanta, and is the 2023 Ferrol A. Sams Jr., Distinguished Writer in Residence at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia.