These songs belong to everybody, which means they...

These songs belong to everybody, which means they belong to no one. We all recognize their greatness, but they don’t really fit into our daily lives. There’s no room for us; the legend is too expansive. When we hear these songs, we think about the singer, not ourselves. It’s hard to talk about them without sounding like a VH1 retrospective.

There’s another type of song that endures but in a completely different way. These songs do make us think about our own lives. We carry them in our subconscious like our hands harbor germs; we don’t always see them but they infect us all the same, and there’s seemingly millions of them. (Actually, it’s more like 200.) It has nothing to do with liking these songs; they become characters in our memories, which makes them as personal as family photographs. They’re so deeply embedded in our pasts that we don’t notice they’re there — and then somebody points one of them out, and this makes us laugh.

Semisonic’s “Closing Time” is that kind of song.

Steven Hyden, We Are All ‘Closing Time’: Why Semisonic’s 1998 Hit Still Resonates

I am having a really, really serious moment with “Closing Time” right now and I don’t think I can really explain just how serious, but that’s OK, because you get it, don’t you?

(via alexbaca)

Truth.

grantland.com