Introduction II

Seems to be depicting the beginning of a party, when guests first begin to arrive, as well as an exclamation of excitement that’s being made by Berman to the listener. The party’s host is excited to spend a blissful night talking to friends, laughing and temporarily forgetting about the problems of the work week, just as Berman, as a songwriter, is excited to be able to share this period of intimately exchanged ideas and free-flowing emotion. However, the last three lines stop the song’s uplifting atmosphere of pure, uncomplicated happiness and optimism:

“My friends, don’t you know that I never Want this minute to end And then it ends...”

Not only does the poem have the party come to an end literally moments after it began, using a nifty trick in which the poem’s pacing is very suddenly warped, jarring the listener until memories are shaken loose, vivid memories of the sad, deflating sort of revelation that tends to occur when one snaps to the fact that this joyous, highly-anticipated event (on which they’d been counting, both for the revivifying properties of socialization and for the possibility of some unknown magic, maybe a chance meeting that ends up changing the course of their life, or some thunderous revelation, falling out of the star-pocked midnight, strong enough to power them through the seemingly endless run of dull days and emotionally excruciating nights until the next party) is over, eerily empty of the radiant potential with which it was shot through just moments ago. The poem also uses the last few lines to suggest that not only does every wildly liberating party have an equally crushing end inherent in its very logic, but that this particular narrator is conscious of this impending comedown before the party has even started, before the album has gotten through even its short introductory remarks. To sit in the earliest minutes of a party, or to grumble in the first minute or two of an album, and be consumed with thoughts of the inevitable sadness that will attend the last guest leaving, the last not fading- that is a well-wrought image of depression. If you’re lucky enough not to suffer from depression, any anxiety disorders or substance abuse issues, but would like to understand what such ailments feel like to those afflicted by them, look no further.