Welcome to a new feature. Here I will feature a song from my past and the specific memory or person I associate with it. My goal is to be descriptive and brief, summing things up in one, and only one, paragraph. My goal also might be to torture you with songs from my past. We shall see.
I hate this song for a variety of reasons: it was overplayed, it’s schmaltzy, the title begins with a parenthetical statement, it’s an example of Bryan Adams at the end of his fame, not the lean, hungry rocker he was in the 80s. But I didn’t always hate this song. When it first came out, I liked it for its subservient, romantic lyrics and I think the piano chords at the beginning suckered me in. But I spent too much time with it–there was no escaping it for a good six months, both on MTV and the radio–and by the time they finally stopped playing it I absolutely loathed it. I associate it with my first boyfriend, probably because it was the love song for the movie Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, that lackluster Kevin Costner effort I loved because I was sixteen and didn’t know any better. We must have seen it together on a date . But it occurs to me now that my trajectory with the song mirrors our relationship trajectory: I liked him, there was infatuation, too much time together, and when it was all over I hated him.