Jesse – Carly Simon
This is the first soundtrack I wanted to write. I randomly heard this song recently and thought about the era when it was somewhat popular in the world, and very popular in my home.
My brother and I loved this song. At the time, very, very pre-internet, the only way to hear music was to listen to the radio and hope they played the song you wanted to hear, or to perhaps badger the DJ by calling and requesting the song over and over. Which we did. I was in 2nd grade, hadn't started taping songs from the radio onto blank cassettes yet, and didn't own any music. All we had was the clock radio that we listened to all day, and that Mom let us set to auto-sleep after 59 minutes each night.
The small-town radio station was Y93; I remember that part. And though this is a very grown-up song about flowers and wine and love and betrayal and breakup and heartache and returning to a love that had burned her, in short, a lot of things we didn't know anything about, we loved it. I don't really like this song now; I probably hadn't heard it twice in forty years, but it was the song that defined a moment. And I think I know why.
The moment: moving from a very small town of about a thousand people to a bigger small town of about 80k. My parents had split, divorced, and Brother, Mom, and I moved to be near Grandma and Grandpa—nearly across the street, in a stroke of fortune. Dad later said he didn't quite understand what he was doing; he thought he was divorcing his wife, but didn't give much thought to Brother and me. Later, when I was an adult, he once told me, "Kids are resilient." We'd get over it. Though I'm not really sure we did. Maybe Dad was Jesse in our song, and maybe we hoped, like Carly and Jesse, we'd reconcile.
Anyway, maybe it makes more sense in that light. We were heartbroken, uprooted, probably a little scared in a new town, a new school. Dad was a part of our life, and even did a good job raising us when we moved in with him in high school.
Apparently, no official music video was ever made for this song. Not only was this pre-internet, but also pre-MTV.