Little Johnny Jewel, by Television

There was this time, when we all got together and played music for each other: just CDs, on a cheap plastic stereo that was about to give up and break down.

It was our first summer together; it was our last summer together. There were many of us, too many to mention, so I won’t mention any. But, ultimately, there was no one.

Being thrown together like that, in an alien environment, meant that bonding went on as a necessity. There was nowhere to hide except in music, and we bonded though music.

We were in university, but we could have been, equally, stranded on an oil rig in the North Sea, or keeping an isolated research post in the Arctic Circle running in spite of extremely hostile local alien activity, like in that film the Thing.

But we were in university. And this was our last summer. We drank the night away, and when I woke up the next day I was on a plane, and the only thing I could remember was Little Johnny Jewel playing on the stereo in the corner and the lights in the kitchen too bright and the imposing boom of human voices as they echoed around the room pursuing different trajectories in conversation, in space. And then, as soon as the voices were there, they were gone, and the music slipped away too.

But music never slips away completely, and it begins to accrue a meaning it maybe never had at first, but it holds this meaning alright. It holds it as long as it can. It holds it as long as a human heart can hold it.

Now Little Johnny Jewel,
Oh, he's so cool,
He has no decision,
He's just trying to tell a vision.