I am walking into this Monday with no agenda or theme for the week, so I hope you just enjoy the music. I remember my son Micah playing some music from a British band called The 1975 on one of our car trips, so I thought I’d dig into that a bit. Apparently, the name of the band came about when one of them picked up a used copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which had the date inscribed in it: June 1, 1975.
Last year, the band put out an album called Being Funny in a Foreign Language and today’s song, “I’m in Love with You.” is from that project. I have to say I was confused by one of the lines, but lead singer Matty Healy explains it like this:
I was trying to make it like a traditional 1975 song. I wanted to debase the sincerity. But [guitarist, Adam] Hann and George [Daniel, drummer] really challenged me on it, so I was like, ‘OK, fuck it. I’ll just write a song about being in love.’ At the time, I was in a relationship with a Black girl who was so beautiful, and I was in love with, and there were all these things that came up—especially with the political climate over the last two years—that you can only really learn from experience and living together. Like, our bathroom was full of specific products for skincare and stuff like that. Things you can’t just get at [UK high-street drugstore] Boots. So, there’s the line that goes ‘You show me your Black girl thing/Pretending that I know what it is (I wasn’t listening),’ which came from this moment when she was talking about something that I had no cultural understanding of, and all I was thinking was, ‘I’m in love with you.’ And maybe I should have been focusing on what it was, but in that moment, I didn’t care about anything cultural or political. I just loved her.
Jeff's Song of the Day 