#114, “Times Square,” Marianne Faithfull (1983)

150 Favorite Songs: #114, “Times Square,” Marianne Faithfull (1983)

I love hopeful songs. We haven’t really begun to get into Bruce Springsteen on this list, but he’s coming, and his best songs inspire a sense that things could be better, that to do it mostly requires some grit and the right people around you and a willingness to try. That’s what I love about them—they make me think I could be better, which makes me want to try harder, which makes me accomplish it, even if only some of the time, and even then if only incrementally.

“Time Square” isn’t that kind of hopeful song. Not even a little. It’s a song written from a desperate, broken point of view. I first heard it from Carla Bozulich, who played it on a tour she did in the early ‘00s where she played The Red-Headed Stranger by Willie Nelson in full. She’s an incredible songwriter in her own right—we’ll get to her later, too—but as an interpreter, her voice carries a weariness to it that few other performers can match, that finds new things in even the most familiar songs. Her voice is imperfect, nasally and she warbles a bit, so when she hits and sustains a note, it’s like “whoa, shit.” And she did that in “Times Square” to the point that i just sort of dropped everything and knew that my job for the next three minutes was to listen to exactly what was happening on that stage.

“Times Square” is a song about searching, which so many of my favorite songs are. It’s a quest—which is, ultimately, a kind of hope, that there’s something better out there and worth seeking out—but the narrator here doesn’t have a lot of it in reserve. “Times Square” was originally recorded in 1983, when the neighborhood was more Charles Bronson than Mickey Mouse. When Marianne Faithfull first sang it, the opening line was “in a tough part of the city” (Bozulich changed it to “a tired part,” which made more sense by 2003 or whenever that show at Emo’s was). She’s walking around a part of town that she knows doesn’t have much for her besides “some fast talk,” offering the song as a prayer for something better. She’s not picky about whoever she’s praying to, either. “If alcohol could take me there, I’d take a shot a minute and be there by the hour” sounds just as good—and just as empty—as “if Jesus Christ could take me there, I’d fall down on my knees, have no questions for his answers.” It’s the “if” that gets you, even though neither Faithfull nor Bozulich actually articulates the syllable. But it’s implicit, something that she doesn’t even need to say, because it’s the whole point of the song—she already knows those exits from wherever she is are not going to work for her, she just needs to acknowledge that she’d be willing to try. And so she’s taking a walk around Times Square with a pistol in her suitcase and her eyes on the TV, before she goes to be alone, thinking about death.

Those aren’t the elements that Bruce Springsteen uses to construct a song about hope, but sometimes, the elements of hope as The Boss sings about them don’t land right. When Marianne Faithfull sings about “playing in a wrong world” or “staring at the movies, laughing at the wrong time,” and imagining booze or religion could take her where she wants to go, she’s singing the hope of resilience, the kind that keeps you alive in the darkest times. It’s a hope that says “I feel despair, I know the way-outs that other people promise won’t work for me, and I could end it all, but instead I’m here, just in case there’s something I didn’t expect to see.” She doesn’t find it in Times Square, but she ends it resolved to wake up in a hotel room. She’ll stare at the ceiling, and nothing will be fixed that next day, but she’ll do it anyway. That’s a kind of hope, too—the kind that speaks through despair. It can carry you through the worst times, until the songs that make you pump your fist in the air start speaking to you again instead.

The point I was at when I first heard “Times Square” wasn’t particularly dark for me, but listen to the way Carla Bozulich sings it, her voice spare, accompanied only by Nels Cline strumming the guitar gently behind her—especially when she holds that note in the first chorus, her eyes on the TV. It woke me right up, told me that I was hearing something that mattered, that was special, that deserved my full attention no matter how tired I was in that moment. Something that I wouldn’t forget. I still haven’t.