You know how sometimes, you get a sudden flash of a song in your head, and want to hear it straight away? I had one of those last week, with Bryan Ferry’s “Let’s Stick Together.” I have no idea what prompted it. I hadn’t heard it in a long time. I didn’t even get the title right when I searched for it. I put in, “Let’s Get Together,” which is also not the correct title of Canned Heat’s very similar-sounding hit, “Let’s Work Together” either. (Fun fact: they were both written by Wilbert Harrison.)
Since realising my mistake, and listening more closely to Ferry’s lyrics in light of it, I’ve been thinking about the difference between getting together and sticking together. Which I’m starting to know something about: 2024 will mark nineteen years since my husband and I first met, ten years of being a cohabitating couple, and five years of coparenting our son. My husband is an excellent fellow, and very much my best friend. Even still, the very romantic story of our getting together sometimes gets buried under all the debris of a decade of sticking together. Small children have a tendency to make things literally very sticky, and are at times so fatiguing that you wonder whether you and your mate are still sticking together, or just stuck.
Pop music tends to fixate on the getting together part of relationships. But there are some gorgeous songs about the phases that follow that initial flurry of excitement. Some are full of yearning, while some sound more weary, and several seem to melt back and forth between the two. Which is appropriate to relationships of different kinds and in different stages, and the wavering energy it is possible to offer life day in and day out.
February is dead dreary where we live, and our flat has been a space of virus and exhaustion for many weeks. I’ve found putting this playlist together a welcome and gladdening exercise in turning my thoughts back towards partnership as more than an act of getting by; as something worth singing about. Yes, love over the long-haul can be a bit of a trudge sometimes, but we can also choose to dance. And if Valentine’s Day isn’t the day to celebrate that, I don’t know when would be.
As always, you can listen here, or here: