It was the lyric and the lilt that hooked me in. The metaphor about the airstrip, the plane and hope. And I’d never heard a song that referred to Casablanca, the movie.
Mainly I wrote songs for their own sake - most were never performed in front of an audience.
It was an enjoyment I kept to myself because sometimes that’s just the way it is. I did wonder if I was the only person in Melbourne, in Australia, listening to Steve Forbert. A one-man fan club. A secret society. A lone, solo follower.
Staring at nothing/But sleep’s petulant absence./Most nights were like this/Toward the end.
I never learn her name and I never speak to her. I don’t change my tutorial time so that I can be in a tute with her, the way I had done in my American History unit the previous semester with a boy who’d caught my eye in much the same way.
My friend Gina sends an email with the subject line ‘Resident Rogues’, inviting me to see a swing/country/gypsy music band from the US in a little bar called the Merri Creek Tavern. She tells me a story as we wait to see the band.
This cheesy American 1980s song, with an equally tacky film clip, provokes a memory bathed in anger, frustration and disappointment - my first experience of really distrusting a real estate agent.
Tina told me one of her favourite songs was a ballad from the album, Fool For You Anyway; for a while, I listened to that song repeatedly and thought of her.
You are captured – taken to shore and tumbled out onto the sand, seaweed in your hair, under the spell of Maggie Rogers.
There was almost no conversation happening in the taxi so when the familiar whistling in the introduction to Wind Of Change came on early morning Portugal radio there was room for listening and contemplation.