Featured Essay: It Took Us Years to Figure Out

by Jim Parisi

I’ve been with my wife, Beth, for thirty-four years. Our relationship came racing out of the blocks at breakneck speed, each marker whizzing by with little time to contemplate the usual concrete milestones such as first dates or weddings, let alone something as nebulous as “our song." 

That all changed one Friday morning in February 2024, when I was texting my friend Liam during our weekly compilation of top 5 songs by a musical artist, which features a lively back-and-forth about our picks as well as an accompanying playlist (and spreadsheet, but enough about me).

When Liam mentioned that a Fountains of Wayne song makes him think of his wife, Ann, I made a comment about how that was their song. Liam told me they had actually come up with another song to call their own a few years ago, at the end of a night of “a wee bit of drinking." (I can give you Liam’s number if you want to know which song they chose. Its not my place to spill that to the world.)

I immediately texted Beth to find out if she had an opinion about “our song.” She replied five minutes later: I’ve Been Waiting? I told her that’s what I was thinking. She said it always makes her think of me; I said it always makes me think of her. Thirty-two-and-a-half years after the fact, we had our song.  (She then texted that the fridge was open—an alert from our intrusive, big brother-ish smart appliance. But let’s forget about that mundane scene from a marriage firmly in middle age and focus on the early magic.)

The song in question, “I’ve Been Waiting,” appears on Matthew Sweet’s power-pop masterpiece, Girlfriend. That album, one of the most consequential records of my life, came out on October 22, 1991. My relationship with Beth, equally consequential, began a mere eight days later, on October 30. 

I wish I remembered how I spent what was in retrospect my last week and a day as a single person. But nothing comes to mind. All I’m left with is the vague, unsettling feeling that those days were nothing out of the ordinary for newly 26-year-old me. It was just a regular week. I went to work (where Beth also worked), went out after work (with Beth also in attendance; more on that later), hung out with my friends, did whatever else it was I did when not at work. It’s as if I had no idea what was going to hit me the following week. 

But before I get into that, I need to take a moment to extol the virtues of the timeless classic that snuck in just under the wire to stake a claim for power pop before grunge ruled the land for the next half a decade. At times a breakup album, written in the wake of the dissolution of Sweet’s marriage, but also an optimistic paean to new beginnings, chronicling the start of his new relationship, Girlfriend is the perfect fusion of emotional highs and lows, a songwriter with an equisite pop sensibility, a stellar supporting cast—led by punk rock guitar heroes Richard Lloyd and Robert Quine—and a production that creates a sonic materpiece, paying homage to the past with a foot planted firmly in the present. 

The formula is clear on the opening track, “Divine Intervention,” a song that rightfully deserves the overused  descriptor “Beatlesque.” It starts off with a digitally altered vocal flourish and features a crunchy rhythm guitar, ethereal backing vocals, and a soaring lead guitar by Lloyd, whose virtuouso performance after the supposed end of the track was the inspiration for the false ending and restart. It’s not my favorite song on the record, but it is Girlfriend in a nutshell.  

The next two tracks—“I’ve Been Waiting” (more on that later) and “Girlfriend,” the breakthrough single, which puts the power in power pop and features Quine’s blistering guitar—take over where “Divine Intervention” left off. Ah, who am I kidding, the next eleven tracks continue the formula, presenting a masterclass in guitar rock that mixes winsome ballads and hopeful uptempo songs with sad and bitter breakup songs, the exemplar of which is the caustic “Thought I Knew You.”  It’s an album that could, depending on your situation,  provide sustenance while nursing yourself back to health after a failed relationship or expand and contract the bellows to stoke the romantic fires while reveling in the start of a new one. 

(The last three tracks were never meant to appear on the record but were included to honor a commitment Sweet made to include every track recorded in the studio on the finished product. Of the three, only “Holy War” stands out, and its subject matter—not a metaphor, but a young man ruing having to fight in a literal holy war—feels out of place on the record. Still a banger, though.)

I can’t even say with any assurance that I was aware of the existence of Girlfriend in the early days of my relationship with Beth. When I texted her last year, we had different memories about playing the song—she thought of us in our first apartment, while I pictured us in my tiny studio apartment. I initially chalked that up to each of us placing more importance on one event in our shared timeline. And both of us have some claim to being correct. But the album was not, despite my assumption for many years, a constant companion from the outset of our time as a couple.

I had always thought that Girlfriend was popular out of the gate, flooding the rock radio airwaves and climbing up the charts immediately after its release. But in doing the minimal research required to write this essay, I discovered that the single “Girlfriend”—which I know without a doubt was my first exposure to the record, and to Matthew Sweet—was not released until 1992, peaking at the top of the modern rock charts in February. That still gives a brief window for our first exposure to the album to have taken place in my apartment, before we moved in together at the end of March, when Beth’s memory takes over. 

No matter which version is more accurate, we most likely existed as a couple for months before either of us had heard the album. Things still worked out between us, and this recent revelation in no way shook the foundations of our marriage, but it makes the release date significantly less serendipitous.

But so what? The album is still important to us, no matter how long after its release we became aware of it. Besides, it’s not as if a blueprint exists for picking that one song that possesses the mystical qualities guaranteed to transport a couple back in time to the early days of their relationship, when everything was new and the world was full of nothing but possibilities. Even if those instructions did exist, Beth and I definitely didn’t follow them.

One such instruction might be to pick a song you remember from the time you first met. I’m sure many couples have fond memories of that first meeting, memories they can rekindle with a song. Alas, the first meeting between Beth and me falls well short of a meet-cute worthy of a song. We met at a party at the house of a co-worker, not too long after Beth moved to the D.C. area, She gave me a hard time because I was talking to the daughter of a co-worker and her friends, insinuating—jokingly, but come on—some nefarious intent on my part; then she went on and on about how she was waiting for a call from the State Department to start a job, which sounded far-fetched, and a little pretentious, to me; and, finally, I was outside the house when she came out to smoke a cigarette, my favorite habit. Joking accusations of pedophilia, dubious blather about her career like a true D.C. veteran, and invasive secondhand smoke. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the future mother of my children!  

That first meeting was out. But first dates are, if romcoms and TV shows are to be believed, another rich source for songs that define a couple. Too bad Beth and I didn’t really have a formal “first date," opting instead to play a game of chicken across a parking garage entryway next to the bar we had just exited after a post-work happy hour, neither of us taking the plunge until Beth asked what I was doing that night. (If she had waited for me to make a move, we might still be standing there, permanent fixtures in the downtown Bethesda landscape.) I proposed meeting my friends at our usual Wednesday night hangout, before deciding that showing up together before we knew what was happening between us—if anything!—was a mistake. We opted to hang out down by where I lived in D.C. Maybe that qualifies as a first date of sorts, but I have no recollection of any of the music we heard that night—if any! So that’s also a bust.

The first dance together as a couple bound in matrimony is a popular choice, or so I hear. Beth and I never had a “wedding,” depriving us of the opportunity to enshrine our song in the company of the assembled friends, family, people our parents insisted on inviting, and assorted acquaintances and randos we knew at the time but would see little of after we were married. 

As with everything else in those early days of our long history together, marriage was unplanned, unexpected, a bit hasty. We had more or less one night’s notice to make a decision; a night that fell a mere ten months after that first non-date. We had no time for a wedding, what with Beth shipping out in two weeks for her first overseas assignment with the State Department (see, she wasn’t making that up; shame on me for thinking she was).  Our ceremony was a Thursday morning excursion to the courthouse in Arlington, Virginia, where I’m sure the justice of the peace and his clerk did not in any way, shape, or form think we were gracing their offices because Beth was pregnant. (Reader, I assure you, she was not.)

Not exactly a traditional start to the marriage, but we’ve managed to silence the haters by putting up 33 years on the scoreboard. And while that ill-conceived marriage plan eventually brought us two children (now grown and out on their own), it did not produce a song we would call our own, despite Girlfriend playing in heavy rotation that entire first spring and summer together.

Beth and I had several contenders if we had felt the need at the time to have a song. Anything from Purple Rain, probably Beth’s favorite album, would have fit the bill (although “Darling Nikki” would have been a tough one to explain to the kids). We danced to that one all the time in my cramped basement apartment. Nirvana made it big more or less around the time we got together. But “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is not exactly a song that tugs at the heartstrings. Many other songs that we listened to, and danced to, failed to leave a permanent imprint on us. 

With so many great songs to choose from, why was it “I’ve Been Waiting” that made its mark with Beth and me? The jangly guitar riff and catchy chorus make their case, as does a Lloyd solo that rips the paint off the walls without feeling showoffy. But the same could be said for any number of songs on the album (just substitute the name of the appropriate guitar player).

I think the song resonates for Beth and me because it is about a new relationship that came along at the beginning of our own relationship. One memory that stands out is Beth singing to me the first two lines of the chorus—I didn’t think I’d find you/Perfect in so many ways—despite the obvious evidence that I am far from perfect in oh so many ways. But reality didn’t matter in those early days, when we were each willing to overlook, or were blissfully ignorant of, the other’s imperfections. (Later on, after kids and the usual ups and downs, we would at times veer more toward “Thought I Knew You” territory, although we thankfully never experienced anything akin to album closer, “Nothing Lasts.”) 

Even the opening lines—When you said to me/You are not so old—make sense in the context of our relationship, as boomer Beth is much, much older than Gen X me—a mere 18 months older, but still technically of a different generation. (This is irrelevant in the context of this essay. I just like to point it out whenever possible.) In fact, only one lyric—You can wear my clothes—doesn’t ring true for us; the reason for which should be evident to anyone who has seen the five-foot-two Beth standing next to all six feet, four inches of me. 

Other than that blip, the song has worked perfectly for us since the first time we heard it. But it has taken on a different meaning since that fateful Friday in 2024, when we declared it to be the song that means the most to us. I had always thought of good times with Beth whenever I heard the song, but now I think of it as “our song,” something special between us. It’s a subtle difference, meaningless in the context of a life spent together, but it definitely happened. 

And “I’ve Been Waiting” still evokes fond memories of our early days together every time I hear it. I know Beth feels the same way. It is the perfect song to define our relationship, even if neither of us stated that outright at the time. No matter how many writers who pen odes to Girlfriend declare it to be their favorite song on the album, it will always be “our song.” 

The rest of you can find another song to call your own. “I’ve Been Waiting” belongs to Beth and me.

[Postscript: In anticipation of writing this essay, I thought it would be fitting to pick up a copy of Girlfriend on vinyl. I knew that I still owned the CD from the early nineties, but this website isn’t called ihavethatoncd.com. I wanted the vinyl. A quick look at all the usual online sources for vinyl either turned up empty or yielded “out of stock” designations, except for one deluxe vinyl edition that went for a cool $150. I was fully committed to doing justice to the album in this essay, but a man has to have boundaries.

I then decided that the CD would work perfectly well for my purposes and set out to find Girlfriend among the boxes and racks of CDs in my basement. Beth had recently bought me a desktop CD player for my birthday. So for the first time in maybe 15 or 20 years, I would be able to play the album in a non-streaming format. Alas, the disc in question was nowhere to be found, leading me to wonder if I ever owned it, which made me wonder to Beth (facetiously…I think) that if I couldn’t locate my copy of this record that played such an important role in our relationship, perhaps everything we thought we had was a sham built on a faulty foundation. Beth disabused me of my fanciful thoughts, assuring me that we definitely owned a copy at one time, but my haphazard storage and cataloging were to blame for its disappearance. 

Thus reassured, yet still unable to listen to a physical copy like in the old days, I went online to snag a used CD, several of which were available at a reasonable price. For a mere $6.80, not $150, I have been reunited with the record that brought us so much joy and played such a pivotal role in our life together.

It turns out you can put a price on love.]

Jim Parisi is a freshly unemployed editor who lives in Occupied Washington, D.C., with his long-suffering wife, Beth, and Dolce, a spicy mix of boxer, pit bull, and Australian cattle dog. (Their two kids, Aidan and Nora, have flown the coop.) He writes the occasional essay for ihavethatonvinyl.com, and his fiction has appeared in The Good Life Review, FlashFlood Journal, and (coming soon) The Bluebird Word. Much of his free time is spent coaching Little League softball. He grew up in New Jersey but urges readers not to hold that against him.

Also by Jim Parisi:

Jukebox Harrow

You’re My Favorite Thing

Name Your Joy