"Coming Up Close" is a beautiful song that still gives me goosebumps. It was released in 1986 and sung by a 26-year-old Aimee Mann, remembering a long-ago night when a lover released her from "a weekend's worth of sadness."

Ironically, one of the reasons I like this song is for a lyric that isn't there. The vocals start almost immediately, just seven seconds after a gently strumming acoustic guitar (and another lazy guitar line, wandering up and down).

Here's what I heard. "The night and I awoke, he and I in a borrowed car. Went driving in the summer, promises in every star..." I thought it was abstract and poetic, but then the internet proved me wrong. It turns out Aimee's first words are simply: "One night in Iowa." The couple still drives into the night together, but there's no indication that Mann feels "awakened" by the evening, or that she's in sync with the stars in the sky.

But the song was so special that the album was ultimately named "Welcome Home," after the way Mann's lyrics describes their special moment of becoming closer. The stars, the deserted farmhouse, the tree, and the mood - "everything sounds like 'Welcome home.'" "Come home," she sings again, almost meaninglessly, as an echo that's abandoned when the chorus jumps to an entirely different thought. "Oh, by the way..." she sings slowly, as all the backing vocals disappear. In a low voice, Aimee confides slowly that she could make "a dream that's only half awake" come true.

But it turns out she didn't say it to her lover. ("I wanted to say," she explains at the end of the lyric.) In a rising voice, she sings the real point of the song - that she didn't feel the need to say it at all. "Everything I could've said, I felt somehow that you already knew." This makes the rest of the narration that much more poignant, since it's just a list of the things done after that moment. "We got back in the car... We drove around the fields until it started getting late..."

Like a lot of Mann's music, there's a sad message behind the sad voice. The song's real theme is loneliness, and a desire to connect. It's sung in the past tense, remembering all the details that led up to the moment, and all the details after it. The lyrics show an intelligent person, collecting up every nuance of the evening. So much has been suggested that there's a heartbreaking clarity in the song's ambiguous ending

"He just got back in his car and drove away."

Learn more about this author, Moe Zilla.
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