Just another achingly lovely little gem from Sweet’s terrific 1991 artistic breakout album Girlfriend, a disc chock-full of delightful power pop compositions the like of which we barely ever hear these days, straightforward, free of pretension, tuneful, and steeped in emotional honesty. Your Sweet Voice comes off like a traditional love song, but you don’t have to listen for long before sensing the underlying sadness, and realizing he’s singing about love’s end, and wondering what he’s going to do now that he’s never going to hear that calming, beautiful voice again. Maybe she’s leaving him; maybe she’s already gone, and he’s just imagining she’s still there to help him through another long, fretful night. Honestly, from the depth of the melancholy at the heart of Your Sweet Voice, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the girl’s supposed to be dead and buried.
The song concludes with a nice sonic touch, the gentle, metronomic thump of a needle playing through the “run-off” groove at the end of a vinyl record, a sound as familiar as tires on a gravel road to we children of the Sixties.
You know, many years ago, when I was young and strong and sure about all kinds of things, I loved me some loud, hard rock ‘n roll, not bullshit hair-metal and all that phoney-baloney crapola, understand, but really hard, stuff like The Stones, the Who, the Clash, Hendrix, the Velvet Underground, visceral, powerful sonic onslaughts that really got the blood flowing back into the extremities. I’m not saying I no longer have any feeling for Jumpin’ Jack Flash, or Won’t Get Fooled Again, Good Lord no, perish the thought, but lately, I don’t seem to want to hear it as much. When I get a craving for music these days, I tend to want something mellow, melodic, and, I don’t know, civilized, I guess. I’m reminded of the really quite witty lyrics to an Eighties tune by Toronto band The Pursuit of Happiness, an impressively rockin’ little number in its own right called I’m An Adult Now:
Sometimes my head hurts and sometimes my stomach hurts
And I guess it won’t be long
‘Fore I’m sitting in a room with a bunch
Of people whose necks and backs are aching
Whose sight and hearing’s fading
Who just can’t seem to get it up
Speaking of hearing, I can’t take too much loud music
I mean I like to play it, but I sure don’t like the racket
Noise, but I can’t hear anything
Just guitars screaming, screaming, screaming
Some guy screaming in a leather jacket
They weren’t even close to middle-aged when they wrote that, but they saw it coming, and now it’s all probably come true for them, just as it has for me. Lately, I don’t much care for the racket either. I’d much rather listen to Sweet’s slow, wistful, part-pop, part-country ballad about missing the warm, even tones of a loved one’s soothing voice.
Like Prufrock said, I grow old.
the needlefish 