youth gone mild

“Hey There Delilah” is never going to sound as great as it did the first time I heard it, hollered passionately and meaningfully by several thousand teenagers at the Theater at Madison Square Garden.

Plain White T‘s were opening for Panic! At the Disco, and though I was marginally aware of their existence, I had severely underestimated their reach.

Most of their set was comprised of cheery, revved-up power-punk, consistently uptempo and relentlessly singable. But the minute the lead vocalist strapped on that acoustic and sang that first fistful of words, it became something else, this immense, transformative, unifying experience.

There are a million reasons this song works, starting with the fact that the name “Delilah” is so fantastically loaded with vowel sounds that it’s impossible to put it in a rock song and not have it sound great. Beyond that, though, what makes it a little marvel is its sweetness: it’s the perfect ballad of separation. The whole song is built on a simple little construct: he’s writing a letter to his girlfriend who’s finishing up college, and he starts out by consoling her. There’s “a thousand miles” between them, and they’re both feeling every last one of them, and so he wants to let her know all the things that are kind of obvious but still nice to hear: mainly, that everything’s going to be OK. The song doesn’t overreach or try to corral some kind of idiotic “poetic muse” to convey this, it just spells it out. The second verse, for example, goes “Times Square can’t shine as bright as you,” and the image comes so freely and so naturally that it’s more ruthlessly effective than any overworked claptrap about supernovas or distant suns.

But then the song changes, and changes in this beautiful, tender way. It starts talking about their future — more specifically, their future together. The singer’s voice is cracked and quivering, but he delivers the next few lines with a determination and resolve, like he’s committing to a sentiment so shopworn and corny that he’s almost embarrassed to be admitting it — but he’s going to put it out there anyway, goddamn the consequences. It’s an incredible bit of actualization, that moment when you realize you don’t care if your friends laugh or if you’ll regret it the next day, this is just something that you have to say. And at that moment the song sparkles with possibility — this great, grand belief in a world that’s yet to be determined, a path that’s only half-laid, a future that’s imminently changeable. He sings “Someday I’ll pay the bills with this guitar,” and, God bless him, when he sings it I want him to — I want it all to come together for these two kids in two different worlds, and I want desperately to believe in their wonderful, storybook dreams of rock stardom.

And maybe that’s why hearing it sung by so many teenagers in such a huge room had such an incredible effect, because I wasn’t hearing the song, I was hearing the possibility, the keenly suppressed teenage optimism finally being allowed to wriggle free and ring out proud in every single one of those voices. It’s a rare kind of epiphany, that sudden thrilling awareness of untapped potential, and when I imagine it visually I see a whole tight cluster of words jamming up against each other and then all of a sudden I see nothing but____________________________________________________________________
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