#137, “Not Moving On,” Art Mayes (2000)

150 Favorite Songs: #137, “Not Moving On,” Art Mayes (2000)

You've never heard "Not Moving On," because almost nobody has, because my friend Art wrote it and put it out on a CD he pressed himself twenty-some years ago, and that's all there is to that. But go ahead and click that triangle up there, because this is a nice song.

When I was in high school, I looked up to Art. We all did, I think—he was a few years older than most of my friends, and he was smart, and enthusiastic, and he was constantly amused in a way that made you want to feel like you were in on the joke. When he recommended a book to you, which he did often, there was at least a fifty-fifty chance that it would change your life. So when he decided to focus on writing songs and then put out his record, I was very excited. I had moved to Texas by then, and he was still in Indiana, so listening to his music was kind of just a chance to hang out with the guy from afar.

"Not Moving On" especially resonated with me, because it is very much a reflection of the philosophy I held at that point in my life. I believed wholeheartedly in Grand Romantic Gestures and found nobility in the notion of sticking with something, even if there was no real chance that it would work out, because you decided that it was worth it. (I got a tattoo of the Alamo on my arm around this time because of how that idea resonated with me; it is, er, complicated to explain that sometimes, given the other connotations that come with the Alamo that were not on my mind when I got it, way back when.)

Not long after I first heard "Not Moving On," I was involved in a thing with this young lady that quickly became on-and-off. We enjoyed one another's company a great deal in the moments we were together, but when we were apart, she had concerns over whether we were really a good match, and would write to me to express them. Following one of those moments when she had reconsidered, early on, I decided to listen to Art, and, on her front porch, I left a vase full of flowers and a note explaining what the sentiment was for. She liked that, as you might expect, and even though she was ultimately correct—we were not a good match, valuing different things and being, even though we were still pretty young, on very different paths for our lives—we ended up involved in that weird sorta-relationship for several more weeks anyway. Ultimately, we both came to understand that we’d make more sense as friendly acquaintances than partnered up, and that was what we ended up to one another.

It took me a long time—years, really—to figure out that the idea of not moving on (and "Not Moving On") is one of those traps that guys with a lot of passion, the rhetorical gifts to convince themselves (and sometimes other people) of whatever they want to believe, and the lack of wisdom to recognize that those rhetorical gifts don't actually make one right all the time, find ourselves in. That viewing relationships as a campaign to be won through big gestures and hard-felt determination undermines the fact that there's another person involved in it, and the other person will be whoever they are, value what they value, and want what they want regardless of whatever grand plan you orchestrate to try to distract them from those facts. For me, learning that was a huge part of the process of growing up and into a person who would be worth anyone’s time.

(It's such an easy, tempting, compelling thing to believe, though. All of those songs and movies and books and stories—those first four Cameron Crowe films!—make it sound so true. Which, I suppose, is why the vase full of flowers meant something to her, too. We all want to live in a romantic comedy sometimes.)

I did move on, of course, but really just onto other women whom I wanted to earn, through mixtapes and scene-setting and big moments and whatever. Until, eventually, I started to realize that, whoever Art wrote this song about—she wasn't in the picture anymore, and whoever the real-life woman who inspired Ione Skye’s character in Say Anything, she probably had an actual inner life that made the image of the boy with the boombox playing Peter Gabriel at her window something other than the single moment that won her heart forever.

But you don't really get that side of the story when the glory of not moving on is the whole point of the songs and stories about people who, ultimately, never really existed in the way that they’re presented. Lloyd Dobler, he's forever on that airplane, you know? I think that I needed to take to heart and really give my all to the lesson in a song like "Not Moving On,” written by someone I knew and trusted and looked up to, in order to realize that all of that is just one of the ways guys like us would romanticize our self-centeredness as nobility.

It's a hard thing to figure out. You have the weight of a culture that tells you in so many ways that those grand romantic gestures are the most powerful thing in the world pushing against you. But it's very important, if you want to start having real relationships with real people. I learned it, in part, because I had "Not Moving On" to help me walk through the truth that how you want things to work isn't really how they work at all, and that that needn’t be so bad.

It's still a lovely song, though.