[MUSIC] Everything But the Girl, "Missing"

[rfmcdonald]

Two songs really caught me after MuchMusic came to my home: Annie Lennox's "No More 'I Love You's" and Everything But the Girl's "Missing"

Below is a fine live performance of the song.

Below is a YouTube video carrying the song, the Terry Todd remix, as it was heard on the radio and seen on the music video channels.

I've no problem with Wikipedia's summary of the song's background and success.

Prior to "Missing", Everything but the Girl was most known as a folk and jazz group. They had released eight albums prior to Amplified Heart and had a number-three UK singles chart hit in 1988 ("I Don't Want to Talk About It"), but were relatively unknown in the United States. "Missing" was recorded as a laid-back guitar-based pop song that had earned modest airplay on U.S. Adult Contemporary radio. The duo gave the track to house music producer Todd Terry to remix for clubs. The resulting dance version of "Missing" became a worldwide smash, matching Everything But the Girl's UK best chart position of number three in November 1995 and hitting number one on the German singles chart. The song became the duo's first U.S. Billboard Hot 100 entry, and after a long climb up the chart, it peaked at number two in 1996 (in its twenty-eighth chart week), eventually spending fifty-five weeks on the chart (a record at the time which has since been broken — the single is today the ninth-longest charting song on the U.S. Hot 100.).

Tracey Thorn later explained to Rolling Stone that "Missing" was originally intended as a dance-oriented track: ^[1]

"It was written with that idea in mind, totally... we put on sort of a laid back house groove instead. Then when we gave it to Todd, he took it in a really, really strong New York house direction, which had a real simplicity to it, but it was very infectious."

Here come the lyrics.

I step off the train
I'm walking down your street again and past your door
But you don't live there any more
It's years since you've been there
But now you've disappeared somewhere like outer space
You've found some better place
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain

The song's fundamentally about a story of loss: Someone goes to an address, looking for someone, knowing that they're not there and are never going to be there, but going out of a sense of grief. That narrative, told in Tracey Thorn's heartbreaking voice against Todd's brilliant subtle electronica, got me hooked, made me as huge of a fan as I could, waiting for the video or listening to the album. It resonated.

Could you be dead?
You always were two steps ahead of everyone
We'd walk behind while you would run
I look up at your house
And I can almost hear you shout down to me
Where I always used to be
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain

Back when "Missing" came out, I remember an article in Spin that suggested that one way the song became as big a it as it did was through gay clubbers, who by the mid-1990s peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic were certainly aware of any number of their friends, vital energetic people who mattered, leaving their friends and the world in a horrible way hopefully for a better, unreachable, place. The stunned survivors could do nothing but watch as the suffering continued and the death toll rose, perhaps sometimes even making it impossible to track the fate of one individual, or many.

Back on the train
I ask why did I come again?
Can I confess I've been hanging around your old address?
The years have proved to offer nothing since you moved
You're long gone
But I can't move on
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain

Freud's thinking on loss comes to mind.

Freud’s essay proposes an analogy between the pathological phenomenon of acute depression, or “melancholia”, and the universal phenomenon of mourning which inevitably follows loss. Freud acknowledges that this similarity was adumbrated by Abraham in his 1911 paper. In fact, however, the connection had interested Freud since at least 1895. In an early text known as “Draft G” – which was not published until more than a decade after Freud’s death – he had remarked that “The affect [i.e., in this context, the emotional state] corresponding to melancholia is that of mourning” (1985, 200). During a discussion on suicide at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1910 Freud had also insisted that the starting point for any understanding of suicide must be a comparison between these two phenomena. The intuition which propelled such as yet embryonic remarks was the key conviction that at the core of melancholic illness is always a “longing for something lost” (1895, 200).

The song's subject is similarly trapped, melancholic and depressed because of something that was lost, something causing the subject to mourn. The subject might well be able in theory to move on, find new people and a better life, but how can that be done, really? The past may be past, but it still shapes the subject, just as it does other people, and that lost person, those possibilities so cruelly shut off--these are losses that are irreversible. How can you recover from these scars?, I ask for the song's subject