folkfixation

I first heard “A New England” on my 22^nd birthday. A link to it on youtube was sent to me by a friend as a birthday present. He told me it was the song that was going to define my year.

I gave it a listen, of course. I was in the habit of clicking on links he sent me even though they invariably ended up being rickrolls. This was not though. Billy Bragg’s strumming hit me, and even before the vocal started, six seconds in, I was hooked.

“I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song, I’m twenty-two now but I won’t be for long.” As those words seared into my brain I sense that this was the anthem I had been searching for, a kind of tonic to define my meandering final semester of college.

By the time the first chorus ended my devotion to the song was complete. “I Don’t want to change the world, I’m not looking for a new England, I’m just looking for another girl.” Billy had caught me. He knew exactly what I was going through. At this point in my college career I had mostly lost the fiery verve that had infused my earlier years to change the world, solve every problem in sight. I’d greatly decreased my participation in the kind of typical dinner conversations every one has in college, where they , full of youthful self-assurance and more confidence in the knowledge imparted by their professors than they have any right to believe they hold the solutions in their hands. No, I had consigned myself to a sense of existential angst, largely induced by the end of a long and arduously complicated relationship I had been in with a girl, one that had never gone particularly well for me, but that in ending left me in crisis. At that point in my life I had given up on the belief that a better world was possible, I really did just want to find another girl.

Needless to say, Billy Bragg’s pithy anthem hit me square in the chest. He was mocking me even while he sympathized with my plight. His two verses had it all: the existential angst, the pseudo-intellectualism (“Is it wrong to wish on space hardware? I wish, I wish, I wish you’d care”). All this in two minutes and thirteen seconds in an song consisting only of Bragg’s voice and acoustic guitar.

And though I’ve moved beyond that point, the song is still magical, a time capsule of a moment in my life, of a feeling so real and vivid that every time I hear the song, I’m taken back to that day, lying in a miserable dorm room and bemoaning my fate, staring at a picture of a girl who I didn’t really want and who had never wanted me.

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