I’m sick of the cynical. I’m sick of the fashion show. The vapid and overblown someone someone tells me I ought to know. I wouldn’t stay around if the money let me linger on until the end of December. And waste another year like a minute, trying to forget, but I remember my home. I left there with bitter words. I’ll go back with cap in hand, and launder the bed I made, hurtful things said, and pick up where I began. The penny lost its shine. Dirty ankles on the promenade in rubber flip-flop sandals. Give me back the rags, the neurotic and the sweet lament, ’cause I can’t handle it. I’m gonna take a lover. Gonna take her back to Somerville. Show her around the neighborhood, re-case the place and settle down. Gonna take a lover. Gonna take her back to Somerville. Don’t care if she’s pretty when we leave Suck City.

Somerville, MA is a little town just north of Boston that like, say, Fishtown, once existed as a small working class hamlet but in modernity, is at a kind of semi-permanent unease with its old ways and its own gentrification, which pits “barnies” (that’s Boston argot for “yuppies”) against the old guard. But the song, penned by Joe Pernice (pictured) and released in 2006, is about a lot more than that: It’s about having contempt — earned contempt — for the banal nature of one’s own scene. It is about a craving for deeper things, and of course, very directly, it’s about wanting to go home. And it just so happens that this was a home you once loathed every bit as much as you loathe your current circumstance in Suck City. The reference tracks back to the memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn which, if you’ve had a wayward father like so many of us have, adds a whole other level to what’s going on here. And there’s already a lot.

At the heart of “Somerville,” though, is a hope, and a promise. The hope is for a new love, someone to share your life with, and the promise is that when you do go back, you’ll put things right. You’ll fix things. You’ll make a new home. You’ll have to. But just like it was for the guy in Bright Lights, Big City, it’s not going to be easy. You are going to have to learn everything all over again.

Download “Somerville” for free here.

Today’s Vibe is a new regular post category on Philebrity, named after our long-lost podcast series, which we really need to dig up and listen to again. In these posts, we will discuss things — songs, people, colors, vibes — that we are into on that particular day. If you feel like you know what today’s vibe is and would like us to consider it, share it with us by emailing tips[at]philebrity[dot]com with “TODAY’S VIBE” in the subject header.

[Photo: Laura Stein]

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 11:54 am.