Patrick recommends “Always” by Erasure
I wasn’t terribly far out of the 80’s when I first heard “Always”, probably about 9 years old in 1997. I couldn’t tell you how many years I listened to this absolutely unhinged song before I knew what it was officially titled, or that Erasure was the artist. As a ten-year-old, I wasn’t sad enough to really care about grunge at all. In a couple years, Alice in Chains and Nirvana would make a lot of sense, even if Pearl Jam never did.
So that left me in my parents living room, listening to KROQ flashback lunches (With Richard Blade) on a combination phonograph/radio/2 deck tape machine. And I had found the Lisa Frank rainbow dolphin of songs. If you really listen to how bonkers the synthesizers are, they might seem more fitting as sound effects for Glenda the Good Witch than components of a soft rock ballad. The singer’s voice could possibly be replicated if one of your friends did too much acid and tried to karaoke David Bowie songs from Labyrinth. To top all of this off, they decided to musically slap you in the face with a single bar of 5/4 in what is otherwise a typical time signature.
“Always” is the musical equivalent to a B-movie, where you can’t tell if they made it bad on purpose or not, but you end up loving it. Speaking of B-movies, do yourself a favor and watch the music video. Whatever they were going for, they went all-in and didn’t look back. While the theatrical costumes and makeup might have been marketing ploys, the unalloyed egotism of the singer is surely not.
I fondly remember hearing this song used for the flash game “Robot Unicorn Attack” when I was in college. My then roommate, who grew up on Tupac and Bone Thugs said something to the effect of “What the F*** is this song?” when he first heard it. Yet after a couple of listens, he was caught helplessly in the cheesy cesspool himself, and I heard him listening to it multiple times as I was unlocking the front door.
Whenever I need some seriously bad 80’s music from before I even knew what depression was, I’ll always cue this one up.
Patrick Mullens is unempl an author living in Bozeman, Montana. He primarily writes fantasy/sci-fi, but periodically delves into non-fiction for autobiographical shorts or scientific papers.
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