"Liberation" (1993)

[listen ... earlier thoughts here]

Silky smooth and all sweet sentiment, "Liberation" probably has to be accounted my favorite song on Very and on my short list of favorite Pet Shop Boys songs too. One of my habits listening to the album included playing it in sequence order but stopping to play this song over a few times before continuing on the daily rounds. I couldn't help myself. It captures exactly the sense of being in love, or maybe just peculiarly my own sense. It felt uncanny the way it could and still can strike a nerve of memory and sensation that rarely dims, although I finally learned I can play it too much. I like the scene depicted in the lyrics: "All the way back home at midnight / You were sleeping on my shoulder ... Take my hand / Don't think of complications." I like the shuffling tempo and light disco touches of the aural setting, the way it soars into the bridge on an aching keyboard/string reprisal of the themes. And I love the idea of the morass of helpless love as liberation. So confounding! Neil Tennant, in notes for the Further Listening package, says the song is "about how, in a way, a relationship is trapping you, but it makes you feel free." That was basically my life situation in 1993, which no doubt accounts for everything, my susceptibility to a song I've seen named by others as the worst on the album. Wrong! Still, "Liberation" was only the fourth of five singles from Very and never did that much, reaching #8 in Finland, #14 in the UK, and missing the charts altogether in the US. Chris Lowe, for his part, seems to see little more in it than its similarities to "Being Boring," from their previous album Behavior (please don't make me actually choose between these two albums). And Tennant has little more to say either, other than that it came together quite easily, with few struggles. He notes some similarities to musical themes in Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet and that's a wrap. "There's nothing more to say about it really," he says.