Back in the 1970’s, Todd Rungren was dating a young woman– a model and Playboy Magazine Playmate– named Bebe Buell. Bebe, in the vernacular of the day, “got around”. She gave birth to a baby girl whom Rungren adored, only to discover, years later, apparently, that the child was fathered by Steve Tyler. Yes, that baby was Liv Tyler. Who famously played a psychiatrist in one of the most appallingly dumb movies I’ve ever seen, “Reign Over Me”. Only in the movies, is a young, sexually attractive psychiatrist compelled to beg her patients to come in, and only in the movies, do they come in when they don’t want to. That conflict, you see, allows you to feel fabulous about role-playing this scenario out in your head: Liv Tyler wants me. I know she does. She will even cancel all her other appointments — which have no existence outside of her appointment book in this movie anyway– and go racing around Manhattan to look for me, because I am just so special. Cue the glycerin tears!
Anyway, Todd Rungren was dating Liv Tyler’s mother, but it wasn’t going well, obviously. He wrote a song around that time: “Can We Still Be Friends”, which sounds a lot like a painful ode to a relationship that had promise but is now disintegrating.
I’ve always thought it was a great song. Unusual. The idea of remaining friends is often given a passing slap of the hand in popular songs about failed relationships, but in “Can We Still Be Friends”, it gets the full 3 minutes of attention it deserves. It’s the opposite of “Don’t Think Twice” and “It Aint me Babe” even though they are both breakup songs. “You just kind of wasted my precious time” is too much truth for anybody. “Someone who would die for you and more”. Indeed.
After I started writing this, I planned to include a quote from the song to demonstrate how acute it was, how poetic the lyrics, how marvelous the insights. But I ransacked the verses and have nothing that isn’t really kind of a cliche: “memories linger on/It’s like a sweet, sad, old song”. Yeah, that’s original.
“We awoke from our dreams/Things are not always what they seem”. Yeah, nailed it.
All right– so it’s not a masterpiece. I will concede that musically, it is fresh. The “la-la” chorus fades into echoes of itself, before joining into a large group affirming there is a future for this relationship, if only…
It’s just associated in my mind with a relationship that went bad long ago, and music always tickles us somewhere.
[whohit]Can We Still Be Friends[/whohit]