Not many people heard Snow Patrol’s “Set the Fire to the Third Bar” (featuring Martha Wainwright) when it came out in lats 2006. It came out too late for my purposes, but was evocative nonetheless, because it is – to my mind – the best song ever written about long distance relationships.
You spend a lot of time looking at maps. Or globes. Or airline websites. In a way, it’s almost better once you have to get on a plane, because then it’s merely five or six or seven hours, instead of driving for days on end. It’s easy to get fooled when you can get up in the morning and have dinner with your sweetie, then leave one sad morning later and be in your own bed that night. Only once you get in the car and drive it out – for a week or two – do you gain an appreciation for just how far you had to go to be together. Especially when making the relationship work involved her getting in a car and driving to Washington DC within two months of the September 11 attacks. I never got a satisfactory answer for what is the female version of “balls the size of church bells” but I know where you can find ’em…