A nice post from Carl Wilson in Slate the other day. You’ll want to check out the whole thing for sure, but here’s a little appetizer:
This is the insight that both Slutsky and Barber have flashed on intuitively, I think, in choosing the comments on songs (out of all the YouTube offerings): that music, because it can be background and foreground, because it is about sculpting time, often insinuates itself into our lives more in the way that people and events do than in the manner of a movie or a painting. It’s a medium of echoes, inherently conversational. The way that we address it, whether coherently or inchoately, is in turn musical.
As an alum of the University of Michigan, I always think of Ann Arbor when I hear Bob Seger (especially “Mainstreet”, but “Night Moves” can do it too). I also think about growing up in Champaign, Ill, another midwestern college town.
Like a number of other artists who hit in the mid 1970s, Seger was over 30 and a grizzled rock vet by the time “Night Moves” finally hit. And while I enjoyed his work during my teenage years, his popular songs from that period (similar to those of groups like Fleetwood Mac) often reflect what I would consider to be the concerns of a people who are now firmly adults (something I’ve realized when I’ve listened to these songs over the last couple of decades).
One of those concerns is undoubtedly the dawning realization that time is not standing still. I don’t know about anyone else, but in my late 20s and early 30s I had my first experience of feeling my youth was starting to slip away. That engendered a pretty heavy wave of nostalgia. Then, that passed. Now, at 50, I realize that 30 was still quite young (and I sometimes have nostalgia waves about that time). I bet my mom, who will soon be 81, feels the same way about being 50.
It’s apropos that somebody would single out Bob Seger and “Night Moves” for this sort of discussion, because it is, of course, a song about nostalgia and the very time sculpting qualities of music that Carl describes above. (“Woke last night to the sound of thunder, how far off I sat and wondered. Starting humming a song from 1962. Ain’t it funny how the night moves. When you just don’t seem to have as much to lose. Strange how the night moves. With autumn closing in…”)
The same is true of many other Seger hits from this period (e.g., “Old Time Rock and Roll”, “Against the Wind”, “Rock and Roll Never Forgets”, “Still the Same”, “Like a Rock”). Unlike his earlier regional hit “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man”, which is very much in the present tense (ain’t good lookin’, and you know I ain’t shy…), Seger’s post-Night Moves work is filled with nostalgic paradise lost stories in which music regularly plays a starring role.
On this Thanksgiving morning, I think it’s time to go put some Seger on and think about the good old days.