From "Lay My Love" to "Let Down" to "Only You"

This morning I am doing my home physical therapy routine (tendonitis and arthritis, right shoulder, left hip) along with the 1990 album Wrong Way Up by Brian Eno and John Cale.

I certainly wasn’t listening to this kind of music in 1990, then still firmly in the grip of my older brother’s focus on 1970s pop and hair metal. I didn’t run into Eno until I got into the Talking Heads and thus David Byrne, and I only vaguely knew of Cale because of the Velvet Underground. My questionable musical taste has been a running theme all my life thus far, and I’m at peace with it, thank you.

The reason I’m listening to this album is because the track “Lay My Love” was used as incidental music in an episode of the second season of The Bear, which I finally crashed through over the recent holidays. Among its many charms, that show is really, really good with music. The famous ending of the season one finale, paired with Radiohead’s “Let Down,” is in my opinion a masterpiece of the musical-emotional cue. It won’t resonate if you haven’t watched the show up to that point, but if you have, it’s very good.

I was into Radiohead since The Bends (yes by the mid-1990s I had at least escaped the prison of Def Leppard), but they’re definitely an acquired taste that I am not always in the mood for. Even rock-focused bangers like “Let Down” can’t help but incorporate their tendency to mordant droning, and it’s not like the lyrics are positive. But somehow, as used in this scene, it’s a suave encapsulation of shit coming together at last, and maybe settling down with your grief.

Anyways, back to Eno and Cage’s “Lay My Love,” which is a weird outlier for both artists in its cheerful uptempo beats, simple melody, and pop arrangement. The vocals are palatably easy to just gloss over if you don’t listen too closely (“I am the termite of temptation”), making it a perfect background tune for, say, doing a bunch of external rotation stretches on your bum shoulder.

Even though it’s separated by almost a decade and arguably a couple subgenres and subgenera of artists, I realized this morning how “Lay My Love” connects in my brain to the 1982 song “Only You” by Yazoo (aka Yaz). The tune and synth-pop melody of the latter are similar but a little cheesier, and of course the vocals and lyrics are more melodramatic and emotional. I have no memory of ever hearing “Only You” until my wife trotted it out years ago as one of her favorite songs from college, even though it was already ten years off the charts by the time she was in school.

When my wife played it for me, “Only You” struck me as dopey and silly and welded firmly into the 80s British pop sound I never much cared for. I made fun of it for this as well as for what I assumed was its permanent obscurity.

So imagine my surprise when “Only You” turned up in Fringe, a show my wife and I watched religiously when it first came on. Fringe was the show JJ Abrams worked on after Lost. Succinctly, it’s his more trippy and sci-fi-focused tribute to The X-Files, with alternate realities folded into the mix. At the end of the first episode of the fifth season, aired in 2012, mentally maladjusted genius scientist Walter Bishop wanders a destroyed future New York. He happens on an old CD incorporated into some dystopian dreamcatcher thing, plugs it into the stereo of a destroyed taxicab, and “Only You” burbles forth.

In this case the musical cue works because it’s so incredibly off kilter. A peppy 80s British pop song blaring in this wrecked and dead world, and then of course Walter spots a dandelion growing through the cracked asphalt. Hope springs eternal! No one ever accused JJ Abrams of being subtle.

But the reason I remember this scene so clearly is how my wife shouted with glee and I cackled in disbelief as we both recognized “Only You.” It was completely unexpected and daffy for the moment in the show, and of course I had to eat a huge helping of humble pie for mocking the song as a dead artifact that nobody would recognize anymore. And like “Let Down” in The Bear, I never in a million years would have thought to put this song in this scene.

There’s a weird alchemy in this, where I end up liking a song and a scene more when they are not an obvious match, especially if there’s no obvious connection to the characters, and no chronological parallel. Yes, it’s cool and a little discordant that “Layla” plays during the gangland execution montage of Goodfellas, but that’s also a clear marker for Martin Scorsese establishing the era of the music and the scene at hand. It fits, which oddly makes it less compelling to me. It certainly doesn’t make me want to listen to “Layla” again. Ever.