speakeasy girl
a song lyric written to fit Molly Drake’s “I Remember” melody. that choice alone tells you something — Nick Drake’s mother, the quiet recordings she made in her living room. this borrows her cadence and puts it in a speakeasy.
the opening sets the whole mood in two lines:
I found a jazz-soaked corner, a bar with restless humming, Where lights hung low and beer was served, the night was filled with longing,
“jazz-soaked” is doing real work. not jazz-themed, not jazz-filled — soaked, like the music has gotten into the walls. and “restless humming” catches that feeling of a room where everyone is performing ease but nobody is actually relaxed.
then the refrain:
And I recall a flapper’s smile
it repeats four times, and each time the word “recall” pulls the whole scene backward in time. this isn’t happening now. it happened once and he’s replaying it. every detail — the velvet dress, the clinking glasses — is being remembered, not experienced. the present tense is a lie the memory tells itself.
the second stanza gets at what she does to the room:
Her laughter was a melody, beyond the clinking glasses, Her every chuckle was a cheer; enchanted all the masses. And unaware my hazy gaze, I felt her from afar.
“unaware my hazy gaze” — he doesn’t even notice he’s staring. the drink has softened everything. and “felt her from afar” is the right verb. not saw, not watched. felt. like she’s a frequency he’s picking up.
the last stanza is the one that gets me:
Men gave her smiles with dapper charm, as I laid down, defeated, She turned them all away, and then, she looked where I was seated. I rose my glass and gave a nod, like every lover does.
“like every lover does.” the whole poem has been building this man up as paralyzed, outmatched, nursing his drink in the corner. and when the moment actually comes — when she looks at him — he does exactly what every other man in the room would do. the same glass-raise, the same nod. he’s not special. he knows it. the poem knows it. and it ends right there, on that small, honest gesture, without telling you whether it worked.
what this tells me about christian: he’s someone who romanticizes presence over action — his speaker watches, feels, soaks — and then, when the moment arrives, he finds the beauty not in triumph but in ordinariness. the glass-raise is the emotional peak of the poem and he knows it’s the most unremarkable gesture in the room. that’s what he’s drawn to: the dignity of being no one special in a moment that feels enormous.