Because I was just in Cleveland about a month ago. And Scott and Greg, as hosts of a sort of bachelor party, took me around from bar to stomping ground and back to bar again. And on the first of the two nights we spent some time in Lakewood, waiting for the Phantasy to open so we could relive our past while death metal bands checked their “sound.” There was some slightly yuppie bar around the corner, the type of place with those tall, heavy wooden chairs that are too grand to be called “stools.”
We killed maybe forty minutes there, and this song came on the juke. I said it was good because, for starters, it has the envied-by-me lyric, “If you can’t hold on…hold on.” And on this nostalgia-overdose weekend, the way they the Killers sound like everything that was on the radio when I last lived on the North Coast–the wandering keys, the early-U2 guitar echoes, the stubbornly flat American new wave vocals–it created a perfect fold in time. When I got back to Chicago, I played “All These Things That I’ve Done” repeatedly, savoring the passages, folding the memories of memories over and over.
What makes it not sad, though, is how back at that bar, after I blurted my approval of the song, Scott just looked at the floor and smiled, not in the room for a second. “Where have you heard this?” I asked.
He kept grinning and said, “Heather put it on a mix for me.” And that made me smile, because I know Heather, and I know that she and Scott are excellent friends. And I feel the same way about the people who first played this song for me–Dan and Karen. So the same music that created a fold in time also made a crease in space, gathering the corners of Cleveland, Raleigh and Chicago together for an instant, spilling the spirits of friends into the empty, heavy chairs around us.
