#133, "Neon Moon," Brooks & Dunn (1991)

150 Favorite Songs: #133, “Neon Moon,” Brooks & Dunn (1991)

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who love “Neon Moon,” and those who’ve never listened to it.

I don’t remember the first time I heard “Neon Moon.” The song was a huge hit—it peaked at #1 on the country charts, was the third of four songs from Brooks & Dunn’s debut to do so—so I’m sure I heard it when I was a kid, but I wasn’t really listening to this sort of thing then, so it didn’t make an impression. But “Neon Moon” is too good of a song to be limited to just its initial run as a single, and so it found me many years later, when I saw Kacey Musgraves play it during a taping of Austin City Limits in 2018. Even within her own impressive body of work, “Neon Moon” stood out, and I sought it out after the show. (Incidentally, Brooks & Dunn re-recorded it shortly thereafter with Kacey Musgraves on lead vocals, deferring to her arrangement and contenting themselves to sing backup and harmonies; she adds a disco beat and robot voices, borrowing the way distorted vocals can add deliberate emotional distance from Kanye. I love music.)

“Neon Moon” is a classic heartache song, just as good a crying-in-your-beer song as anybody ever wrote; if Hank Williams had heard it, he would have thought, “Damn, wish I had written that song.” The imagery is powerful, alternating between the concrete, but still poetic, description of sitting in the run-down bar past the railroad tracks and the singer’s imagined young lovers, running wild and free, before bringing it back to the smoke-filled room, and the hook is perfect, just incredibly satisfying to sing. “If you lose your one and only / there’s always room here for the lonely / to watch your broken dreams / dance in and out of the beams / of a neon moon”? An AA/BB rhyme scheme never sounded so good.

But what I also love about “Neon Moon” is that it belongs to everyone, and it should. Country music, obviously, does not have a reputation as being particularly inclusive or welcoming to folks whose backgrounds diverge from white, southern or midwestern, culturally conservative, etc—you know the stereotypes. And Brooks & Dunn are, uh, not exactly subversive or counter-cultural in their approach to the genre. They’re as mainstream as the mainstream gets. But the feelings behind “Neon Moon” speak to a universal experience in a way that anyone can take some comfort in singing along. Accordingly, the song has been adopted by a huge number of folks from different backgrounds, all of whom have every right to watch their broken dreams dance in and out of the beams of a neon moon. Early ‘90s country production not your thing? You can hear Kacey Musgraves contemporize it; if twang of any sort turns you off, and you prefer shoegaze guitars and lo-fi headphone rock, here’s Cigarettes After Sex taking it out for a spin. Want to nod your head to that feeling instead? Try Houston rapper Fat Tony’s take on the song, which he takes and twists into something all his own. If you feel most connection to a sad song when it’s a cumbia, La Energia Norteña’s version finds that the words of a sad song seem to say what you think when accompanied by an accordion and a saxophone, too. Want to hear it as a pop-soul standard? Here’s Leon Bridges plucking it out on a guitar as he sings impossibly smoothly about about how he spends most every night beneath the light of a neon moon. Curious if it works as a jazz vocal standard? It does, in fact, when Malena Cadiz sings it.

This all feels worthwhile to me, having lived the better part of a decade now in a culture that seems impossibly fragmented. I’m not naive enough to believe that everyone feeling some claim to “Neon Moon” is going to, I dunno, heal the soul of America or something, but it is nice to experience some sort of universality, with people with whom we share the world. It’s possible to imagine Beto O’Rourke and Ted Cruz singing it together at karaoke, and while I don’t think that changes anything, I’d rather find some points of connection than dwell solely on differences that seem overwhelming, if we are all going to live here together. Meaningful or not, there’s always room here for the lonely.