Going Back To Knowing Nothing

Majical Cloudz “Disappeared”

There’s a line in Spoon’s “The Mystery Zone” that’s never too far from my mind, in which Britt Daniel sings about “the times that we met before we met.” He’s romanticizing the time before two people connect in a meaningful way, and he’s fantasizing about going back in time and doing it all over again. This Majical Cloudz song is sorta the reverse of that idea, and dwells on the time after you’ve become estranged from or simply lost touch with someone who was once important to you, and going back to being strangers with separate lives. There’s a lot of yearning for the past in this song, but no fantasy – he wants the old intimacy, and knows he can’t ever go back. He can hardly even imagine experiencing something similar with someone else. It’s an incredibly sad song, but despite its despondent tone it also conveys a lot of kindness and sympathy for the people who’ve moved on. It’s a lot easier to retroactively make the people who disappear from your life into villains, and that’s not what this is at all. This is more like the thing you wish you could say to someone, but can’t out of respect for their wishes.

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