by Grant Price

Of course he chose that song for it. That old Crowded House one where he sings hey now, hey now, don’t dream it’s over, and it has that reverb-heavy guitar line and the snare drum and the voice that sounds as though it is being torn apart by forces greater than anything we can conceive. The number has barely started, but already people are rearranging their hands in their laps and swallowing more than they otherwise would because they know what’s coming, and the old boys in their suits especially are staring into the middle distance with jaw lines tight and gazes hard. When we were students, the DJs used to play the song near the end of the night for the maybe-couples who needed a little push in the right direction and the already-couples who wanted to believe that they’d found what they thought they’d always been looking for. Later, after we’d found jobs we didn’t want and created families we struggled to keep together, the same DJs, more haggard and less enthusiastic than they had been in their twenties, played the song on alcohol-heavy theme nights that sought to recapture the spirit of something that should have been left alone. All it did was remind us that the clock was running down quicker than we ever considered possible. Now, older still, we sit and listen as the singer frozen in time implores us not to let them win, whoever they might be, and everybody is tearing up because there’s the maple box at the front of the room, which is about as final as you can get, so the entreaty not to dream that it’s over, beautiful and romantic as it might be, comes across to us as somewhat ironic. And that’s exactly why he chose it.

Grant Price is a writer and photographer living in Berlin.