Sunday Pages: "Save a Prayer"

A song by Duran Duran

Dear Reader,

My oldest son, who is somehow almost eighteen, is a big music guy. He is constantly updating his Spotify playlists, waiting on new releases, checking Billboard charts. For a teenager, his knowledge of music is encyclopedic. He loves hip hop most, but he listens to all kinds of genres, and he has very good taste. Even when he was little—six, seven years old; before Spotify existed, and compilations still had to be burned onto now-obsolete CDs—he could make pretty decent mixes.

Now that I’m writing this, I remember that one of the first string of words he ever uttered, in his entire life, was “tee-choo,” which I eventually determined was a line from “The Sound of Silence,” one of the songs I sang him every night before bed: Hear my words that I might teach you. He was maybe a year old.

Sometimes he will ask, “Dad, what’s your favorite song?” This is an impossible question to answer. My favorite song right this minute? My favorite song of the 21st century? My favorite song of all time?

There is a short list, of course. “The Sound of Silence.” Billy Joel’s “Miami 2017.” “Chicago,” by Sufjan Stevens. “Lola,” “Stairway,” “Another Brick in the Wall, Part II,” “The Gambler.” Andrew Lloyd Weber’s “Memory” is pretty amazing. How to decide? It seems to me that my favorite song of all time should be the song that I’ve loved the most, for the most time.

Which means it has to be a song by Duran Duran. Which means it has to be “Save a Prayer.”

When I was in fifth and sixth grade, I was obsessed with Duran Duran. I had all three albums then available—Seven and the Ragged Tiger, Rio, and their debut, Duran Duran—and I listened to them constantly. I had Duran Duran posters all over my room. I bought issues of Tiger Beat and clipped pictures of Simon Le Bon and John Taylor and Roger Taylor and Nick Rhodes—Andy Taylor didn’t usually make the cut—and I taped them to my walls from floor to ceiling. I had a blue and white sweatband that looked like the one Simon wore in the video for “The Reflex,” and I wore it around my wrist every day, and I got pissed when my mom insisted on washing it and the color faded. If I wore that wristband, the thinking was, I might grow up to be like Simon Le Bon, crooning in a successful band and careening through the Aegean on a yacht. My parents were very, very concerned about me.

The level of my obsession gradually waned, as childhood obsessions will, but I never let Duran Duran go. By the time the ho-hum Notorious was released in 1986, the band had begun to occupy that overexposed/overrated territory where John Travolta found himself in the years before Pulp Fiction, and admitting you liked them was social death (a phenomenon I wrote about in my novel Totally Killer). This did not stop me from triumphantly bringing my newly-purchased Decade collection to school. I continued to play Duran Duran tracks here and there, and spun them regularly at the epic dance parties we threw in college (c. 1992-95), along with other favorites from the early 80s—thus helping usher in the “eighties retro” movement (you’re welcome). I listened to them as a single guy in New York, I listened to them after my wife and I got together (no way I’d marry anyone who didn’t love Duran Duran), and I listen to them still, because they’re awesome.

Back in fifth grade, I was confounded by any attempt to understand the meaning of any Duran Duran song. “New Moon on Monday?” “Rio?” “Hungry like the Wolf?” Simon Le Bon’s lyrics are about as easy as a nuclear war. As a grown-up, I revisited the Le Bon libretto, hoping that my degree in English Literature, my writing bona fides, and my three semesters teaching undergraduate creative writing would arm me against the illogic of Simon’s words. No such luck. Despite the wisdom of my advanced years, I still have no idea what forces comprise the Union of the Snake, if they are marshaled for good or ill, or what their rising might herald—this despite untold hours listening close to the voices in your body coming through on the radio. To be clear: cryptic song lyrics are not necessarily bad—it’s better to string together interesting phrases in the style of Beck than go the Steve Miller route and badly rhyme cliché with cliché. Even Simon’s lowest moments are still vastly superior to, say, “Take the Money and Run.”

The one song in the Duran Duran songbook that does make sense is also the one that is the best in terms of melody, arrangement, instrumentation, and mood: “Save a Prayer.” Nick’s haunting sequencer plays throughout the entire song. John Taylor’s bass line, punctuated by ninths that amplify that hauntingness, is just sick. (He is, in addition to being one of the world’s best-looking people, one of the world’s greatest bassists.) There is even that musical twist so rarely used in pop songs: a coda. But in “Save a Prayer,” the lyrics come together into something truly special.

The song is about a one-night stand. It begins:

You saw me standing by the wall,
Corner of the main street,
And the lights are flashing on your window sill.
All alone ain’t much fun,
So you’re looking for the thrill,
And you know just what it takes and where to go.

In the second verse he gets more vulnerable, more emotional—rare for Simon. There is this little gem, with the last line practically begging to be used for your senior yearbook quote:

Take a chance,
Like all dreamers can’t find another way.
You don’t have to dream it all, just live a day.

The music builds, matching the drama of the hook-up, which he explicitly states—also rare for Simon—in the last verse:

And you wanted to dance, so I asked you to dance,
But fear is in your soul.
Some people call it a one night stand,
But we can call it paradise.

So: they meet, things are going really well, what may have started out as a casual fling has the potential to be much more than that—dare they risk this beautiful chemistry by going all the way? (“Dance,” in this context, doesn’t really mean dance.)

But the genius of the song is that he’s singing about what’s happening in the present moment. The (still awesome) video depicts a haunting memory, but the lyrics make clear that he’s having these thoughts after they finish making love, but before they drift off to sleep. He likes her and wants this to continue. She feels the same. But who can control their feelings? Who can decide whom to love? And that’s the meaning of the chorus:

Don’t say a prayer for me now—
Save it ‘til the morning after,
No, don’t say a prayer for me now—
Save it ‘til the morning after.

He recognizes, knowing himself and his implicit wandering eye, that help from the Almighty is not needed in the paradise-like afterglow, but the following morning, in the rude light of day, when they wake up and part ways. And we know he knows he needs the divine aid, because he keeps repeating the line in the coda:

Save a prayer ‘til the morning after.
Save a prayer ‘til the morning after.
Save a prayer ‘til the morning after.
Save a prayer ‘til the morning after.
Save a prayer ‘til the morning after.
Save a prayer ‘til the morning after.

This is almost, itself, a prayer.

And if real-life events are to be believed, the strategy worked: “Save a Prayer” came out in 1982. Simon has been married to the model Yasmin Parvaneh since 1985.

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This has been a glorious week for justice, Dear Reader—one of the most promising string of days we’ve had in quite some time. I’m glad that I’m leaving for my three-week hiatus with things on the upswing. But let’s bottle up all these optimistic and happy thoughts and call them to mind when they’re really needed, when things look more bleak, as they invariably will. Simon says: save a prayer ‘til the morning after.

The PREVAIL column will resume on September 4, with “Sunday Pages.” New seasons of the PREVAIL podcast and The Five 8 kick off on Friday, September 9. Thanks, as always, for your support and encouragement. Enjoy the rest of your summer (or winter, if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere). As Liz Cheney said at the last J6 hearing, “We’ll see you in September.”

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ICYMI

On the season finale of The Five 8, our guest was the incomparable Noel Casler:

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Photo credit: Cover of a Duran Duran music book I’ve had since like 1986.