#10, “Designs On You,” Old 97s (2001)

150 Favorite Songs: #10, “Designs On You,” Old 97s (2001)

When I was twenty-two, I met a girl.

I had moved to Austin that year. It was a transformative event for me. I’d been living in San Antonio, and I was miserable there. I’d followed a girlfriend to the city, and the relationship ended poorly after a few months. I spent half a year feeling sorry for myself. The life I had in San Antonio wasn’t the one I wanted for myself—I didn’t have many friends, and the ones I did have were in very different places in their lives than I was, which made me feel isolated even when I was with people who cared about me. I lived with four roommates in a three-bedroom apartment in a part of town that felt like the suburbs; anywhere I wanted to go, I needed a car to get to. Rent was cheap, but that was about all it had going for it. After a few months, it started to occur to me that I could just move because I didn’t want to be there anymore, and that leaving didn’t mean I had to retreat and move back in with my parents. I could go anywhere.

I had driven up to Austin with one of my roommates to volunteer at SXSW that March and while I was there, I saw a car that had two bumper stickers—one for Willie Nelson and one for Fugazi. I thought, “I want to be friends with a person who has those two stickers on their car,” which is such a silly thing to think, but it was a catalyst moment for me. I hadn’t met those people in San Antonio. So I made plans to move, and I had an apartment with new roommates by June. And I was determined to do everything differently when I got to Austin.

Years later, I talked to my friend Rachel about it, who was one of the people I was friends with in San Antonio. She told me that she had never believed that a change in environment would really change a person’s life until she saw what happened to me when I left.

I just felt free. My car broke down a few weeks in and I started walking everywhere, which I could do since that apartment was in the center of the city, just south of the river that cuts across town.

I had gotten a job at Half Price Books, which is where I’d wished I could work when I was in San Antonio, and where I’d gotten hired a month or so after the move. It really did feel like it was all coming together. (When my car broke down, I left it in a parking lot, eventually had it towed to a junkyard and sold it for $500, which was $100 more than I had paid for it in the first place. My life was full of unsuffered consequences.)

And I met a girl at the bookstore. She worked there, too. We connected really quickly, started spending time together outside of work. Someone sold a VHS boxed set of My So-Called Life and we made plans to watch it together. By the time my birthday came around in May, she was the person I wanted to spend it with. We went out for ice cream and wandered around the city; eventually, we walked over to a hill alongside Waller Creek, where you could sit and listen to whoever was playing the amphitheater at Stubb’s for free. We sat down and Willie Nelson was playing, and I got the feeling that she liked me, too. He started playing “Always On My Mind” and I leaned over and kissed her. It was really nice, I told her that I had wanted to do that for a long time. She said, “I have too. But I shouldn’t have.”

I had suspected, and talked myself out of the idea, that she had a boyfriend. It was another coworker of ours, and they’d kept that to themselves because she didn’t want to have to deal with everyone at work being in their business, or with having to deal with HR or whatever else that you deal with when you work for a corporation and are dating a coworker. And, she said, she hadn’t told me because she didn’t want me to know. She liked what was happening between us, too, until it became real. We walked back to my apartment, where she had parked her car, and didn’t say much to each other as we did.

I remember going inside and feeling crushed. None of my roommates were home and I put on After the Gold Rush by Neil Young and lay down on the floor with the lights out, feeling like an absolute self-parody version of a heartbroken dude on his birthday. And then Carl and Fernando came home and found me and were like, “Dude, what the fuck?” And I told them what had happened, and they were like, “Dude, that sucks,” and I remembered that I didn’t want to live like I had in San Antonio, so I turned off Neil Young and put on Satellite Rides by the Old 97’s, because I wanted to listen to “Designs On You.”

“Designs On You” is one of Rhett Miller’s narrative songs, which are my favorites of his. It’s very vivid—set, I think, in Austin (there are references to standing on the corner of Sixth, which is a famous street in this city and maybe New York, but not many other places), about being out with a girl named Annette who is getting married, and deciding to pursue her anyway. Each verse opens with a variation on a theme: “Standing on the corner of Sixth and How to Forget,” or “Sixth and Where Do I Go,” or “Sixth and What Do I Get,” which are all intersections just a few blocks away from that hill where we listened to Willie Nelson. The song is written from the point of view of someone who knows it’s not likely to work out in his favor, but who approaches the situation with a swagger anyway. “I don’t want to get you all worked up, except secretly I do,” he sings in the pre-chorus bridge, and then bursts into a chorus that’s just the lines “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have designs on you” repeated a few times over.

That was how I decided I wanted to deal with the situation I was in, too. I had spent years feeling like the classic Neurotic Boy Outsider archetype, and I just felt too strongly about this girl to take it the way that I would have in the past.

Did you know that it’s possible to change your personality, at least a little bit? That you can decide that the way you’ve been isn’t the way you want to be, and you can make yourself something else, something you’d rather be? I hadn’t realized that until the week I turned twenty-three. It’s not easy; it requires you to change the way you think about yourself. I invented a persona, and changed my name on LiveJournal, which was where I lived on the Internet at that point, to reflect it. I declared myself Dan Solomon: Man of Action! and every time I felt nervous or insecure or foolish, I would put the song back on, either on my headphones or maybe just in my head. “I do wish you’d come over / but I’m warning you if you do / I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have designs on you.”

I didn’t feel bad or guilty about pursuing someone who had a boyfriend, because the song told me to be up front about that. It wasn’t a secret plot, I wasn’t trying to trick her into leaving him. That’s one of the things that makes this song, which is otherwise kind of sleazy, more than what it seems. A boyfriend’s not engaged. Engaged ain’t married. You can have intentions, if you’re honest about them. I spent a lot of time that week thinking about what Johnny Cash said to June Carter the first night they met. “You and I are going to be married someday,” he told her. At the time, of course, they both were married. To other people. All of this went down in my life just after their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt as alive as I did that week when I was twenty-three years old and inventing who Dan Solomon: Man of Action! was going to be, in love with this girl I wanted too much to not change who I was so I could be someone who would pursue her. I think I slept maybe four hours a night. I ate six Ritz crackers and three small oranges every day and nothing else. I felt wired and intense and nervy and powerful. I stated my intentions and made my move. And I really don’t think I would have had the confidence to do that if I didn’t have “Designs On You” in my ear, giving me a soundtrack for the person I wanted to be.

Did it work? It depends on your perspective, I guess. In the one sense, it did not: I told her I had designs on her, and she told me that she had decided that she needed to see the relationship she was in through. In the other, larger sense, it did: The person I became that week, the one who decided to chase what he wanted instead of regretting that he didn’t, who saw himself as worthwhile enough that he could risk being embarrassed or feeling foolish, who was willing to try to do things that felt really hard—that person stuck around. I don’t think I’d have done most of the things I’ve done in my life, the things I’m most proud of, if I hadn’t talked myself into becoming a Man of Action. When I think about my life, I think about that week as one of the major turning points. The person I was before that week isn’t the person I am now. I’m grateful for that.

Oh, and it worked in another way, too, in the end: Four years later, we got married.

A few months ago, I had a long call with Rhett Miller for a story I was working on for Texas Monthly, where we went through stories from the Old 97’s thirty-year career. We were talking long enough that I felt comfortable being a little self-indulgent, so when we got to Satellite Rides, I told him (a very abridged version of) this story. He was pleased, as you might imagine most people would be to hear that something they did was so meaningful to someone else, but he also laughed. The song was about something real—he’d written it after spending some time with a woman he was falling in love with, who had a boyfriend of her own—but he’d never thought of it as a serious one. Annette was a friend of the band, and he’d written it to make his bandmates laugh. (Her fiancé didn’t find it funny.) You really never know what the things you put out there will mean to someone else.