20 Years in 27 Days: A Marriage in Music
#13 The Moments—“Look at Me I’m In Love”
by Mark Anthony Neal
Driving south on the West Side highway, below the GW Bridge, presents one of the most beautiful glimpses of New York City and New Jersey, separated by the Hudson. One of the joys that I took from those early days of my relationship with my future life partner, was picking her up from the Butler Houses and driving downtown via the West Side Highway. It was one early Saturday morning in February of 1988, when we planned a day in the village. I was in the practice of making cassette tapes for each one of our planned outings, but this time the woman switched things up on me, and presented me with her own tape of music.
Already pretty arrogant about my musical taste—and what I thought was the mind of an untapped audiophile, I wasn’t suspecting to hear anything on her tape that would surprise me—and she didn’t. But one of the gems on the tape was The Moments’ “Look At Me I’m in Love.” The song had long been one of my favorites—was popular on NYC radio in the mid-1970s when I had my first crush. The group even recorded a French language version of the song, that was more than helpful when I struggled through two—God-awful—years of French at Brooklyn Tech. To have it included on her tape was a sweet surprise—one that led me to take my eyes off the road a little too long, just enough to nudge the car in front of me on a slow moving West Side Highway. It was just a fleeting moment in a new relationship, that was getting serious, but a moment we have gone back to, many times. I don’t know what it continues to mean for her, but for me it was just a small glimpse into her sweetness and her early understandings of the small gestures that move me. She has long ceded those kind of small musical moments to my “life of the mind,” where music just becomes the opportunity for me to expound upon more data.
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20 Years in 27 Days: A Marriage in Music | #12: Luther Vandross —“Wait for Love"
