But my heart still bleeds for this place that I call home
There are two kinds of people – those enslaved by nostalgia and the blissful few who aren’t. For us in the former group, as we grow up we start finding the memories of our youth particularly rose-tinted and heartwarming: things really were the best they ever were back when we were younger, weren’t they? But time moves on and if you’ve ever moved away from the city you lived in, you know the strangely alien feeling of witnessing that perfect world of your memories disappear in reality. Buildings that were a fixed part of your daily scenery get demolished, rebuilt and repurposed, familiar faces and names disappear, and the world you used to know intimately has now changed into a stranger pretending to be your old friend. Returning to your old homegrounds is always a little surreal, especially if the visits there start growing further and further apart. I moved countries around my twenties and because it wasn’t always easy to travel back to where I used to live frequently, my return trips grew further apart – and every time I did finally find my way back, it felt like my own home city had grown even more alien than before.
I relate so much to Wire wistfully singing about the grass acres of his carefree youth turning into concrete fields in the song of the same name. This is a bittersweet visit to Wire’s old home town, of wonderful memories of playing with his brother in the same areas that now stand as a reminder of everything having changed forever. Parts of the song hit even harder now – and feel eerily precognitive – as Wire mentions how the happiest times were when sitting with his mom and dad, as Wire lost his mother around the same time that the song was released, and his father a year later. The line “the air is getting heavy with memory and loss” is devastating in this context, even though the song wasn’t written with that added connotation in mind.
The song itself is a surprisingly cheery little pop number, and Wire pays obvious homage to the inspiration behind the music when he starts quoting Terry Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun” at the end of the song. “Seasons in the Sun” is an infamous example of how much (and to some, how clumsily) its 70s hippie folk sunshine melody and the actual lyrics clash, with the song being a happy-go-lucky singalong about the narrator’s dying thoughts as he bids goodbye to the people closest to him. Wire quotes a part of the chorus to “Seasons in the Sun” verbatim as the outro to “Concrete Fields”, and it hammers in what he’s trying to go for with the song and its wistfulness, the warm and happy memories mingling with the melancholy of the present. That juxtaposition would still be present even without the direct nod, as Wire’s grovely and time-worn voice jumps up so much when backed up by a jaunty little ray of sunshine like this.
Ever since I crossed over my 30s I’ve become a hapless victim of nostalgia partly due to how everything in my life has changed so radically from where I used to be. “Concrete Fields” on surface sounds like a whimsical novelty cut, but it hits me surprisingly hard because, like Wire, I long back to the green fields where I played with my friends and wasted my idle summers.
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