I am not one of those people who glances back to adolescence nostalgically. Being a teenager sucks. There, I said it. Probably the best bit of teenage-ing is that when it ends you get to suppress all its horrors, be that with the help of legal alcohol, an ephemeral and organic blossoming into one's person, or intensive application to the work of re-inventing oneself. I can't remember exactly when I heard Kathryn Williams' track "No-One Takes You Home" (2002), but it was deep into my teenage wilderness, in the period where I obsessively loitered in the CD section of my local library, sourcing any and all balms for my soul. To this day, the song makes me cry. It encapsulates the unsettling isolation of trying to figure out who you are in the world, how to navigate social landscapes and to make connections. It's that slippery feeling of needing to move beyond an emotional economy based on external validation - who likes me and how much?; what box should I be in? - to inhabit instead one founded on authentic extension of yourself into the world. And how desperately difficult, if not impossible, that shift can be. So I guess, this is a track for teenagers only in the sense that that it when I discovered it first. Really, it says a lot about adult-ing too. I would argue - perhaps predictably - that it is a song that expresses in particular the tensions of woman-hood, of being a feminine object entrapped in the patriarchal system, whose worth is defined more or less explicitly by being taken home by a prospective sex partner, rather than by one's ability to create a home for oneself in the world:
Now is the time to find out why you're buying everything
Now is the time to find out why you sigh at everything
You dress your self up to the top of your knickers
And you smell so good it's like a box of chocolates
But no one takes you home
No one takes you homeYou've watched all the romance on the television
It's too much to bear you've got to get a new sort of vision
You've done your best at the gym you've got your lip-gloss on
You're going to the doctors to see if it's a medical problem
'Cause no one takes you home
No one takes you homeIt's breakfast, it's lunchtime, it's dinnertime
Spent with all those women's magazines
That tell you you're not as fine as you look
To yourself in the mirror
In the morning when you smile
To get yourself out of the door
To give life why can't life give you some more?
'Cause no one takes you home
The lyrics are deceptively simple, with clean lines. And that sparseness, the banality of some of the imagery - knickers, gym, the television - lets your own life fill in the gaps. Or at least it did back when I first heard it, and every time since then that I have listened, as my connection to the track evolves as my own life changes over the years. This is a heart-breaker of a song - a yearning love song for the self, for the satisfaction of being taken home one day and the hope of not needing that validation at some point.