We’d been driving and had stopped at some high point, near a cliff edge or lookout of some kind; everyone else got out, to stretch and take in the view, but I stayed in the car, doors open and windows down, overtaken by that particular kind of end-of-day summer torpor (or call it langour, or maybe lassitude), wide open spaces all around and something ungraspable and inexpressible within me. And “Losing My Religion” came on the radio, and I’d heard the song many times before — enough times to recognise it instantly, although of course the mandolin intro is particularly instantly recognisable — but this time it was the perfect soundtrack to the moment and to the inchoate swirl of half-coalesced feelings slowly swirling inside me, that heady concoction of freedom and yearning and other things both experienced and anticipated.
I couldn’t explain it then, and I can’t now. But I think that all of that was in some sense already ‘in’ “Losing My Religion”, just waiting to be revealed: the song itself has the breeziness, the colour and the light and the lightness, the hint of melancholy and shadow, the surface simplicity which conceals unchartable depths, the commingling of all those interstices and intangibles which make it great. It has an easy familiarity and, at the same time, the hue of complete originality. And, most of all, it reminds us of the essential mystery of pop music: the way a few notes and a melody can invoke and create a whole world, carrying us away and enriching and deepening everything we feel and know.
