#27, “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea,” The Cure (1992)

150 Favorite Songs: #27, “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea,” The Cure (1992)

I’ve written about a few Cure songs here so far, both of them these anthemic curtain-raisers that are about moods and tone-setting more than they’re about anything specific. There are, I think, a few distinct eras of the band’s music, but confusingly, they don’t exactly unfurl chronologically. There’s the punky, poppy, new-wavey Cure of “Boys Don’t Cry” and also of “The Caterpillar” and “Just Like Heaven,” which are from albums released over the course of eight years, between 1979 and 1987; in between, there’s the sweeping, grandly gothic Cure of Pornography that resurfaced in 1989 on Disintegration, and then again in 2000 on Bloodflowers. Then, finally, there’s the Big Rock Band Cure that began breaking through on “Shake Dog Shake” and “A Night Like This” and then fully emerged on Wish in 1992, and which hung around for Wild Mood Swings and even those hard-to-listen-to 2000’s albums, which are both casualties of the loudness wars that rendered so much of that era’s music painful.

I am mostly drawn to the Cure’s grandness era, but “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea,” which is my favorite Cure song, is very much from the Big Rock Band era. This isn’t a tone-setter; it’s very specific, both lyrically and musically, with all of the guitars the band used at this point in its career firing off in different directions—one doing a jangly REM sort of thing, one feeding back in the distance, one playing a buzzsaw riff high up in the mix, while Robert Smith sings a song of doomed love that begins in media res, with the opening line of every time we do this, i fall for her setting the scene. What’s “this”? It’s watching the sun come up from the edge of the deep green sea, having a moment together that they both know won’t last, that they both desperately wish would, that they both lie to one another and themselves about. Are they a couple, or something else? It’s unclear, and not important. They’re tormented, which becomes clear as the song unfurls, the lyrics full of dialogue from this doomed morning on the coast. He says i know this can’t be wrong and she says never never never let me go and then why do you cry, what did i say? and he lies that it’s just rain and she says why are you letting me go and i feel you pulling back and this goes on for four verses before we even get to the song’s chorus, where we spend our time inside the singer’s head, as he dwells on the unhealthiness of this constant encounter. i wish i could just stop, he tells us, the listener, but not her. i know another moment will break my heart. The song, like many Cure songs from the era, takes its time in expressing all of this, running for nearly eight minutes of rock and roll.

And, man. I don’t know. I think if you are a certain type of person, a song like this sounds as romantic as it gets, the tortured love of too many tears, too many times, too many years i’ve cried for you infinitely more compelling than a proper, happy love song, and that is the sort of person I have always been. I remember listening to “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea” as a fourteen year old, sitting on my bed and feeling that depth of emotion because a girl I met at the town fair liked my friend instead of me, even though I was the one she asked to walk with her to watch the fireworks on the fourth of July, and again listening to it at twenty-one, and again at twenty-four, this song a symbol of raw, immature, youthful love, the kind that it’s impossible to make stay but which feels so powerful, maybe because you don’t know what to actually do with it.

That’s no way to live your life, and as you get older—or, at least, as I did—I came to accept that there was a time for sitting on your bed and listening to “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea” and connecting with it, and after that time, there was no need to continue chasing that feeling. I’d already felt it.

I remember how absolutely confounding it was when I learned that Robert Smith, rather than being tortured by his own aching love affairs, married a woman he met when he was in drama class when he was fourteen years old and that was basically the extent of his romantic relationships. But I think it makes sense, the more I think about it—on a song like “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea,” he gets to feel it without living it. It took me a lot of years to recognize that I could do that, too.