Song of the Week: Love Comes Quickly
you can't stop falling
I’m in sixth grade. I have some kind of multi-page report due tomorrow, maybe it’s a report on a U.S. President or a research paper on, like, the state of Louisiana. Whatever it is, I am downstairs in the back corner of our tv room, clacking away industriously on the keyboard of a Macintosh Plus1, one pointed finger at a time (I wouldn’t take Type I or Type II classes, where they teach you proper multi-finger typing technique, for another year at Clayton Intermediate). I’m probably experimenting with the time-honored, academic-adjacent Art of Subtle Tweaks To Meet The Minimum Length—font size and margins and line spacing, an experiment/art that I’ll continue iterating on well into my college career. My stress level is high (for a sixth grader living in a stable home in a free country with plenty to eat during peacetime, lol). The procrastinator in me2 is counting on that little shot of stress-based adrenaline to power me to greatness. Or a passing grade, whichever comes first.
Next to the makeshift computer desk, on the carpet, plugged into the wall with a scavenged extension cord, is a single-speaker cassette player (who needs stereo?). Nothing fancy. Just enough to do the trick. I often roll my eyes at kids who listen to music through the crappy, tinny speaker on their phone/laptop, compromising the audio quality to a dizzying degree—hours of artistic work and thousands of dollars of time and musical & high-fidelity recording equipment, just to push it out through the least ideal speaker possible. But kids just want music however they can get it. I’ve got no room to talk; I was listening through this:
Not exactly an audiophile’s dream. But it did the trick, providing a soundtrack for my procrastination-induced writing binge. That Little Cassette Player That Could on that Night Before The Multi-Page Report Is Due is, for sure, playing one of five possible cassette tapes:
1. The Beach Boys / Made In U.S.A.3
2. Howard Jones4 / Dream Into Action
3. U2 / The Joshua Tree
4. The Beatles / 20 Greatest Hits5 (a gift with literal lifetime ripple effects from my sixth grade “girlfriend”; thanks again, Alison!)
5. Pet Shop Boys / Please
When I think about the soundtrack to my elementary school homework, Please is the tape I remember the most. Maybe because I played it the most. Maybe because it feels the most varied6 from the other four. Maybe because it has, in retrospect, the most in common with Madonna, whose music I could take7 or leave8, than anything else I listen to. Maybe because it’s the farthest from the kind of music I gravitate towards now.
Or is it? Is it really so far removed from the music I listen to in 2025?
Tell me the beginning of The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” isn’t a sped-up homage to the little boop-beep thing at the beginning of “Tonight Is Forever.” It is. It even runs parallel in the group’s structure: “one guy singing” and “one guy playing a synth/laptop.”
Speaking of which, one of my favorite groups of the past dozen years or so employs the same formula as Pet Shop Boys9. In Sylvan Esso, Nick Sanborn is the guy behind the laptop while Amelia Heath10 takes the role of frontwoman, laying her vocals over the top of it all and, in concert, providing the visual focal point in true lead singer fashion.
A similar duo dynamic exists, to some degree, in other contemporary bands I like a lot—Phantogram, Broods11, Run The Jewels12—and also happens to exist in some great 80’s era music—Yaz, Tears for Fears, Eurythmics, Soft Cell, Suicide13. In a world where The Beatles popularized the quartet as a default setting for pop music, it’s striking to see that halved. Two people making all the sounds (noise), creating all the emotion.
It appears I would be wrong to say I’ve distanced my musical self from the Pet Shop Boys’s music. Maybe it’s actually embedded in me deeper than I thought, this synth/laptop + vocal thing. A thread of what Pet Shop Boys started has continued on in my music taste since 1986. I just didn’t recognize it when it was wearing non-Pet Shop clothing.
I have always wanted to try my hand at a Postal Service-ish collaboration. I just haven’t run into my electro-beep-boop-genius Jimmy Tamborello yet.
This week’s song “Love Comes Quickly” has all the hallmarks of a great Pet Shop Boys song:
-infectious synthetic beat/intro
-Neil Tennant semi-sassily talking (most famously and wonderfully done in the verses of “West End Girls”14), in this case before the verse starts, “sooner or later, this happens to everyone, to everyone” (and later in the song too!)
-musical drama
-a hooky verse melody, featuring Tennant’s iconic nasal, world-weary delivery
-an even hookier chorus, featuring Tennant’s actually really good understated melodic delivery
-the words “forbidden pleasures”
-the wicked balance in the lyrics of Tennant’s irony-laden cynicism and his underlying, undying hope that always peeks out eventually, however briefly
-an underrated bridge musically that really hits the spot and lyrically, well, it sings better than it reads: “I know it sounds ridiculous but, speaking from experience, it may seem romantic and that’s no defense, love will always get to you.” The power of melody!
“Love Comes Quickly” was considered a disappointment at the time, following on the heels of “West End Girls” going #1. But, in interviews, both Boys from the Pet Shop have said it’s a favorite of theirs.
We’ve got that in common.
I suppose there’s chance it was a Macintosh SE or Macintosh II, but I don’t know for sure and all the pictures I looked at online just muddied the waters more. The Macintosh Plus above is what I remember?
Still there!
RIP the legend Brian Wilson
Maybe I liked the Beach Boys so much because these songs sounded the best (a lot of Wilson’s mixes were deliberately mono, if I’m not mistaken) through the single speaker, by design?
I wrote about this particular greatest hits compilation a bit here:
It’s an obscure title but I’m going to claim it:
The Biggest Howard Jones Fan Who Never Saw Howard Jones In Concert
The first album I ever bought with my own money was his third album, 1986’s One To One. I would’ve been 10 years old at the time.
This and The Joshua Tree were the hinge on which I pivoted away from synthesizer-based 80s new wave-ish music and towards guitar-driven classic and alt-rock.
It’s most similar to Howard Jones, in terms of its era and synthesizer-heavy music. But it feels a lot more deliberately cold and clinical than all of the other albums, including Dream Into Action. Neil Tennant’s voice can, at times, give off a purposefully unemotional, toneless feel. The way he almost robotically delivers “What have I done to deserve this” is exhibit A (highlighted all the more by being juxtaposed with Dusty Springfield’s full-of-feelings vocal) and the robot-read of “We’re S-H-O-P-P-I-N-G, we’re shopping.” (More people need to spell things in songs. Aretha spelling R-E-S-P-E-C-T and Van Morrison spelling G-L-O-R-I-A and The Kinks spelling L-O-L-A, for just three classic examples.) To say nothing of his practically monotone but somehow also breathless and sassy pseudo-rapping on “West End Girls.” You cannot convince me that Madonna’s super-hit “Vogue” with its infectious dance beat and the bridge’s monotone and breathless and sassy pseudo-rapping—”Greta Garbo and Monroe, Dietrich and DiMaggio”—wasn’t directly influenced by Pet Shop Boys.
It’s definitely the most dance-oriented album, intended for the clubs. I had literally zero concept of this at that age. Dance music would’ve been disco in my mind, not this pulsing electronic-driven stuff. Uintah Elementary School didn’t have much of a new wave late night club scene.
And, tonally (music and lyrically), it’s got its own thing going on.
I love Ray of Light and Music, for what it’s worth.
I know. Six lashings for me. (One for each great Madonna song.)
I can’t tell you how hard it is not to write THE before Pet Shop Boys. It’s how I would say their band name for sure. But that’s not what they call it. It’s just Pet Shop Boys, no THE. Just like Pixies. No “the.”
I am positive that Heath is just as involved in the album production as Sanborn. I suppose I just mean the visible/marketing presentation of the band: Amelia up front and Sanborn twisting knobs in the back.
“Mother and Father” is an elite song.
Maybe the producer/vocalist thing is more common in hip hop. I’m not versed enough in the genre to say. I just know I dig the musical dynamic when El-P and Killer Mike work together. It’s got something special you don’t get out of either of them individually. Symbiosis.
OK, Suicide was a 70s act, but I wanted to include the classic “Dream Baby Dream” but didn’t want to research 70s duos AND write a whole other sentence.
But you’ll hear it in a lot of Pet Shop Boys songs:
Domino Dancing
“When you look around, you wonder
Do you play to win
Or are you just a bad loser?”
Opportunities
“You can see I'm single-minded, I know what I could be
How'd you feel about it? Come take a walk with me
I'm looking for a partner, regardless of expense
Think about it seriously, you know it makes sense”
Heart
”Beat…beat….beat…beat…heartbeat.”
The spoken word part of “The Pop Kids.”