I was hoping you might change your mind.
The other day as I was sitting at a coffee shop, the Alkaline Trio cover of this song came on.
When I was in my teens and I’d sometimes hear it as a flashback track on KROQ in Los Angeles, I loved it for its unusual sound and for its mentions of European trains, which I’d romanticized, but I wasn’t well-lived enough at the time to understand what the song was really about. So it was like I was hearing it for the first time the other day, and it just broke me, the precision of its lyrics, the way that it’s about something that I can’t stop thinking about, how a moment can be full of the weight of so many earlier moments, how the past lingers in the present, how the smallest things can haunt us the most. “The soldier turned, and looked away.”