Listen Up: Slow Club's Long-Distance Love Song

Rebecca Taylor and Charles Watson, the two Sheffield, U.K.-based musicians who make up the band Slow Club, aren't boyfriend and girlfriend―at least, that's what I'm told. They sing a lot of love songs but not to one another, and so I'm not sure if their song "Christmas TV" is based on any real experience or not, or which one of them it's about, or if it's about either one of them at all. What matters is that it feels true. And it does.

The song was released as a single in the U.K. in 2008, a year before the band's debut LP Yeah So came out there and two years before it came out in the States this spring. It came out in December, but despite that—and the title, and the conspicuous scarves and sweaters on the album cover—it's not really a holiday song. It's a much, much rarer thing: An utterly guileless, brutally honest little song about a long-distance relationship.

There are plenty of songs about people in love being apart, emotionally and physically; musicians being so prone to travel and touring, so prone to leaving people behind, I guess there won't ever be a shortage of them. There are songs that plead (like Bob Dylan's “Boots of Spanish Leather,” in all its demands for shoes and chastity) and others that make big sloppy promises (like Richard Marx's “Right Here Waiting”—which has reached the point in its existence at which it's funny to consider it being about anything at all, actually), but there are so few that fully express the prolonged strangeness of being physically removed from someone you love—not just the leaving, but the being gone.

My own experience with that prolonged strangeness explains why “Christmas TV” completely gutted me when I heard it for the first time last year. The song so singularly encapsulated so many of the feelings of my own long-distance relationship that it was physically painful to hear—and in that way it was unlike any song I'd heard in the last seven-and-a-half-years. That's how long my boyfriend Joe and I have been together, most of that time spent 120 to 330 miles apart as we juggled college and work and grad school and each other. (Are you cringing right now? Because I know he probably is.) By now, we're close to being masters at it, but it's still hard―hard in a way that's both simple and incredibly tricky to express. It's our world, it's what we know; we love each other, we make it work. It can be strange, though, to look out into the world—out into the vast, weird mediated cultural landscape, at least, of music and TV and movies—and not see or hear anything that even remotely resembles what we're doing with ourselves.

All relationships are tough and inexplicable in their own way, to be sure, but long-distance ones are so often thought of as sad, ticking time-bombs just waiting to be set off by some indiscretion or pure wavering impatience; they're punchlines if not dramatic plot points, not handled all that seriously because they're not usually taken all that seriously. And even when they are, something almost always feels not-quite-right. Nights and Weekends, the Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig movie that came out in 2008, did its best to capture the feeling of long-distance dating; I actually avoided watching it for over a year because I was sure it would just tear me up, hit me right straight in the heart. But I shouldn't have worried. It's the most pointed swipe I've ever seen taken at what, exactly, it feels like to be in that situation, but it still fell short—less because it was someone else's story and more because it didn't tell its own story's best part.

It was a movie about how a long-distance couple lived when they were together (turns out, they're just as adorable and/or as prone to squabbles as anyone else) but that's only half the picture. The other half―the tougher half, the more crucial half (and the more entertaining half, if someone could just get it right)―is how you are when you're apart, how you are during your everyday lives that have nothing to do with one another's. That half is what "Christmas TV" is about, and is from where it pulls all its power and all its beauty.

Taylor and Watson both sing, trading lines and harmonizing on the chorus; there's two acoustic guitars up front and a swirling electric that comes in later, but mostly it just sounds like two kids singing in a bedroom―or maybe two bedrooms, miles and miles apart, filmed in split-screen. They're together and they're apart; they waver between impatience and loneliness and these brief, small moments of shared joy. The song is part catalog of laments and anxieties, part pleading supplication, part celebration of love, and it all works beautifully. It works the same way long-distance relationships work―the same way that any relationship works: It strikes an awkward and completely unlikely balance with itself. “It's brutal, it's brutal / Why can't you see?” goes the first line of the chorus, but they never ask themselves what they're doing or why, because they know—of course they know, or they wouldn't be putting themselves through all this. The last line of the chorus, repeated twice, shows their hand: “You pull me out of the dark and now it's light / You pull me out of the dark and now it's light.”

I went to visit Joe this weekend, went up to North Carolina where he's been working on his MFA for the past year and a half. It's a long trip but lately it's been easier to say goodbye, because he'll be graduating in May and joining me in Atlanta soon after; this might have actually been the last time I'll drive away from him and he won't be close on my heels, following me back. Finally, finally, I am considering the very bizarre possibility that, in one month's time, I might not even remember what it's like to leave him and be apart for so long. After that, when I hear this song, will it make my heart hurt as bad as it does today? Until I can say for sure, its final refrain becomes my own:

So come on home
Just come on home
Just come on home
Just come on home

Rachael Maddux is Paste’s associate editor. Her column appears at PasteMagazine.com every Monday.