williebhines: Sleeping with the Television On. I... |

Sleeping with the Television On. I am having a Glass Houses marathon in my brain.

I touched upon this in my long post defending Billy Joel a few years go, but it’s worth mentioning again. Everyone has an image of what it means to sleep with the television on; it’s instantly relatable in the kind of “how come no one else put that into a song” kind of way. But of course no one else put it into a song, because you didn’t sing about things like that before 1980 or so, and you didn’t sing about things like that after 1980 or so. Around 1980, you could write a meaningful, earnest, vulnerable song about lonely people trying to make connections. (The Pina Coloda song came out in 1979; if it had been released in 1974, or if it had been released in 1984, you never would have heard of it.)

“Tomorrow morning you’ll wake up to the white noise.” I love when the last line of a verse foreshadows a chorus. Genius, really.