#6, “Out To Get You,” James (1993)

150 Favorite Songs: #6, “Out To Get You,” James (1993)

In the very first entry in this project that is now hurtling toward its conclusion, I wrote that “Everyday” by Buddy Holly was my first favorite song. I think “Out To Get You” was probably my second.

I wasn’t that interested in music until my teen years started, and then it became the only thing I was interested in (well, that and the X-Men). I was thirteen at a really good time (well, for music, things were pretty rough for the X-Men around then). Pop music had swung in a fascinating direction for a brief window. If I had been a few years older, the stuff that got played on the radio would have been, like, Motley Crue and Warrant; if I had been a few years younger, it would have been Korn and Limp Bizkit. Instead, I was thirteen at a time when a band like James, a British pop/rock band who were at that point on their fifth album, could have a huge American radio hit out of nowhere.

That song, “Laid,” was the title track to that album, and I did what I always did with songs I liked on the radio that year. I went to the library and checked out the cassette tape to listen to in my bedroom one hundred times.

“Out To Get You” is the first song on Laid. And hearing it felt like something went right through me. It’s a very delicate song, opening with gentle bass and some simple plucked guitar, plus a slide guitar that appears to add texture. The vocal, which comes in quickly, is similarly delicate, with Tim Booth speak-singing the first line with fragility in his voice.

I was a sad kid, just by disposition, and felt a kind of loneliness and yearning that I didn’t really have words for, even though I think they’re actually pretty common for young teenagers who are beginning to imagine their adult lives but still have years to go before they are ready to live them. And from that very first line, “Out To Get You” nailed that feeling for me. “I’m so alone tonight / my bed feels larger than when I was small,” he sings, before describing the absence of a long-gone lover, which was obviously not something I could personally relate to. But it didn’t matter, because speaking that vulnerability itself was enough. I listened to “Out To Get You” and heard someone singing a sad song about wanting connection, and I was a kid who had moved around a lot and never really fit in, and so was desperate to connect. That feeling was very tender, something I kept buried deep inside to protect it from the world, and then this quiet, sad song pierced it, and it felt safe to express it, even if that expression mostly looked like rewinding the tape to play “Out To Get You” again.

There’s a line by Third Eye Blind, of all bands, that captures what it feels like to have that moment of connection with a song, to find in music something ineffable. During the “doot-doo-doot / doot-doo-doo-doot” song, right in the middle of singing some nonsense, Third Eye Blind Guy* sings, “and the four right chords can make me cry,” and I think that’s insightful—it’s often something really simple in a song that hits, and it’s hard to explain why. Because for all that Tim Booth singing about feeling so small they could step on you and needing the human touch spoke to me, I think what really got to me about “Out To Get You” was the drums.

The drums in “Out To Get You” are very patient. We don’t get any percussion at all in the first verse, nor in the chorus. In fact, they don’t show up until the song is more than half over, during a refrain, and even then it’s more the idea of drums than an actual drum sound. It’s not until the second run through the chorus, when the song is mostly over, that they really hit. Booth just sings the chorus the same way he did the first time through, except there’s a kick drum punctuating it, and it just made that sentiment go from seeming small and delicate and intimate into feeling huge, in the way that a kick drum drenched in reverb can seemingly fill any space.

There’s an old line—nobody actually knows who first said it—that goes “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” and when I try to capture why picking that moment in that song made me feel seen and understood as a thirteen year old, it seems very accutely true. But “Out To Get You” isn’t a poem, and if it were, I don’t think it would be an especially good one. The words were meant to be sung, and that singing was meant to be accompanied by melody and punctuated by rhythm, and the emotional journey the song is meant to take the listener on relies on those things, too. Taking the feeling the song expresses from quiet and personal to resounding and powerful by stomping a bass drum in time is part of that journey—the fact that the song waits so long to reach the point where it can spill over in that way makes the moment the drums come in feel like a release, and that’s the magic and alchemy of music. If you’ve already listened to “Out To Get You,” go back and start it over once it’s finished, and listen to that first chorus again. You can hear the lack of drums. In a song that is about missing something vital, their absence is meaningful. When they come in, finally, the song finally achieves some catharsis.

I certainly couldn’t have articulated that when I found “Out To Get You”—I don’t think I would have even identified it, probably wouldn’t have even agreed if someone had said “the drums give the song its gravity,” but I have had thirty years to think about this song, and why it made me feel so understood. And it is that transition from intimate to resounding, from absence to presence, that I connected with. It made the song feel like it was taking me on a journey to understanding my own feelings, rather than didactically telling me what they are, and that is why I still think about “Out To Get You” after all of these years. I don’t know how a person knows that they will accomplish that by waiting to bring the drums in until the final two minutes of the song, but it’s amazing to me, still, that there are people who do.

*Third Eye Blind Guy is not my kind of guy, and any wisdom he expressed seems purely accidental. Pretty much everyone who has ever encountered him seems to have a similar story; I won’t spend any more time on this here but ask and I’ll tell you mine.