Love Walks In
Is your seat belt on? We're going down a rabbit hole.
Van Halen’s power balled “Love Walks In” came up in “Bring Me The Beauties,” a completely bananas HBO doc series set in 1980s Manhattan about a cult of gorgeous models who believed that aliens could walk into human beings. The song was a stray detail in a montage of celebrities who took a shine to the bestselling book, Aliens Among Us, which platformed the cult leader at the center of the doc.
I always thought “Love Walks In” was a song about, well, love, that Sammy Hager used the metaphor of an alien entering in your body to evoke what it feels like to be lovestruck. But it turns out he was using the metaphor of love to evoke what it feels like to have an alien occupy your body. Ok!
I can’t in good faith recommend the doc series. How much patience do you have to listen to pretty people reflecting on how they got caught up in something completely insane? I have less and less - those Nexivm people really wore me out.
But then - and I don’t exactly know why - while I had “Love Walks In” playing in my mind on repeat, I also started thinking about this gem, Stephen Bishop’s “It Might Be You,” from Tootsie. Soon a trance-like-state fell like a net over my life, and between errands and obligations and conversations, I was listening to the two different songs quite a bit, appreciating that they both seemed to be set in the emotional landscape of a man reeling from meeting a wonderful new woman, or alien. And yet they had such different emotional textures, one a kind of maybe??? and the other, a YES!!! And I was wondering, which man was having the more dramatic emotional experience, really; the maybe fellow’s heart is opening, but he’s scared to feel hopeful, while the YES guy seems utterly locked and loaded ready to be overcome by an alien.
Let’s take it to a vote:
And then at one point I was walking down the street alternating listening to these two songs for the 40th time when I realized something earth shattering. You should sit down for this. The songs essentially share the same leit motif. The first little melody that launches both songs, and recurs across the ballad, is very nearly identical. Same key, nearly the same notes. One’s a lot heavier on synthesizers but it’s the same musical skeleton dressed up in different 1980s ways.
I’d pay good money to see a picture of my face as I realized this.
So go ahead. Listen to the first ten seconds of the Love Walks In.
Then It Might Be You.
Go ahead and do it again and again and again, it’s amazing, and there is no real rush for you to get to the next paragraph of this bananas essay.
I was thinking one of the songwriters must have “borrowed” from the other, right?
I raced to Wikipedia. Sammy Hager of Van Halen claims to have written “Love Walks In” in one sitting when an alien entered his body. Van Halen’s song came out three years after Stephen Bishop’s won the Oscar so it’s entirely possible that Sammy had Bishop’s melody kicking around his head. If Sammy was aware of the influence, he didn’t say as much, instead crediting aliens. “The easiest way to put it is that they downloaded my brain information.”
The Family Dog
A friend took me to see the funniest play I’ve seen in a very long time. The Family Dog, written by Bailey Williams, runs till June 30 as part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks. It was such a blast and a pleasure. Somebody better remount this (I bet someone will). Info here. It’s sold out but you can get on the wait list.
Paintings by Edvard Munch.
Thanks for reading and thanks especially to my paying subscribers, who make Refreshments available for all.
I will leave you with this gem. My friend said when he was little he thought the lyric “on a little row boat to find ya” was “on a little row boat vagina.”
xo Lizzie
PS - There’s still time to join my summer memoir and personal essay writing class on Zoom. For more information and to register, please go to my website.