What is a love song, anyway?

Some words on Translator's extraordinary "Everywhere That I'm Not" (1982)

I think it sounded different than everything else, especially at the time it came out. It had this strummy, shuffly, almost swing sort of vibe to it. It wasn’t just clipped eighth notes like a lot of things were then. I think that had a lot to do with it.

That’s Steve Barton in 2015 talking about his band Translator’s “Everywhere that I’m Not,” at that point over thirty years old yet still as startling and invigorating as a sudden cool breeze. Barton has been asked time and again about the song and its attachment to so many people. Like many indelible works of art, the song came quickly. Barton has said that he’d been marked at the time of its writing by two twin yet unrelated developments: a relationship that he was in was hitting the rocks, and Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life was playing in high rotation on his turntable. In particular, Barton was obsessed with Iggy’s “The Passenger,” its three chord shuffle meshing gears with Barton’s churning insides. Can I do that too? he wondered, before lifting the needle and playing it again.

Co-written with the guitarist Ricky Gardiner, who provided the heavy-lidded riff (inspired by a drive in the countryside), Pop’s tune celebrates aimlessness, driving around, gazing out of car windows at passing scenery all the while turned-on that “everything was made for you and me / All of it was made for you and me / ‘Cause it just belongs to you and me.” Such clarity must’ve elevated the car another inch or two off the ground—you can hear Iggy’s pleased half-grin as he sings. Barton internalized the song’s chord sequence and its leisurely pace, adapting them to his own, darker needs: he was writing an anti-celebration. “[‘Everywhere that I’m Not’] certainly doesn’t sound like an outtake from [Lust for Life] but somehow it was a major influence,” Barton remarked to Lisa Torem in 2012. “I read once that Elvis Costello wrote ‘Watching the Detectives’ after listening to the first Clash album. This was the same type of thing—it doesn’t sound like a Clash song, but it might not have come about without that album.”

The woman in Barton’s ill-fated relationship? She acts as a shadowy figure in the song, a ghostly, emotional stand-in. “I don’t know if it was exactly written for one person in particular,” he said in Rocker magazine in 2012. “I was in a relationship that was ending and I’m sure it focuses around that a little bit but not completely.” “Everywhere that I’m Not” is the opening cut on Translator’s debut album Heartbeats and Triggers, released in 1982, and, remarkably, that version is a demo that the band had recorded swiftly two years earlier. (It sounds as if it was EQ’d a bit by ace producer David Kahne, and Barton has since revealed that the producer also “suggested putting the strummy acoustic guitar all the way throughout the song.”) “I wrote it really fast,” Barton recalled. “I went into rehearsal and said, ‘I wrote this.’ It was fully formed. And we started to play it.”

He added, “It seemed like a song that came out of nowhere.”

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A love song is a breeze that comes out of nowhere. No, that’s not a line from an crappy pop song, it’s a genuine attempt on my part to think about the eternal impulse to write music, which must feel as elemental, and as mercurial, as the weather. A love song, of course, can take as many shapes and moods as there are lovers, can make as many arguments and discoveries as there are lovers breaking up. “Everywhere that I’m Not” is an interesting case study: a love song to a ghost who may never have been material at all.

Two essential moving parts groove the song, which presents an indifferent, ironic vibe on its surface but desperation underneath. One is Larry Dekker’s walking bass, a brooding, searching line that both anchors the song and propels it forward. Dave Scheff’s snare stutter kicks off the lament, even if the singer may not be ready for it, joined by Bob Darlington’s guitar that with Barton’s drapes itself casually yet prettily over the rhythm section. Yet the mood is all Dekker: his confident bass moves in counterpoint to the singer’s bafflement, sympathetic, but also a little amused at the absurdity of wanting something so much. “It swings,” Barton acknowledged, “and the bass line is so memorable and infectious,” adding that “that is one of the other keys to [the song’s] charm, I think. It draws you in.”

What it draws you into is the singer’s mess, his messy grief. Dekker’s line ascends in the opening bars with seven notes that pauses at the top, looks around, doesn’t find her, and crawls back down to do it all over again—it’s a a sonic Sisyphus. (Dekker gives the singer a break in the verses, mounting a smaller, if no less steep, hill of five notes.) The effect’s exhausting, and every bit the feel of the genuine anguish of a broken heart, of having and losing, and the unhappy compulsion to keep searching for—while all the time feeling—what’s gone.

Barton’s vocal is the other key moving part in “Everywhere that I’m Not.” His singing moves from ironic and bemused to anguished and pissed, and back again; it’s a verbal head-nod to Dekker’s bass line. Barton’s lyrics are brilliant in their incisiveness. They chart, in simple terms, shorn of literary excess, a tiring campaign across desire, with the added attraction of desire’s nagging tendency to see phantoms everywhere. He thinks he sees her on the street, “But I guess it was just someone / Who looked a lot like I remember you do”; that night, he thinks that he hears her in the bar, “But, no. It was just someone / Who sounded a lot like I remember you do”; driving home, he feels her touch (“on my clutch”), but…. The age-old struggle’s between his rational understanding of how the world works—she’s gone, I’m fucked—and his irrational need to still see and hear her everywhere. She’s in New York, Tokyo. Nova Scotia, of all places, but he isn’t. And yet she is. The melody in the transcendent chorus descends slightly, a head-hanging recognition. Big surprise for doomed lovers of all stripes: absurdity wins out.

I love the way Barton sings the word “Tokyo,” with an American’s giddy love for the exoticism of its sound; I love the way his register rises and falls with his madness, brave in the opening bars, unhinged by the end of the song; I love the inevitable repetition of I’m not, I’m not, I’m not; I love it all—Barton’s vocal on “Everywhere that I’m Not” is among the most expressive in rock and roll’s history, not simply his era. (And on a demo!) There aren’t too many songs when, as I listen—at home, in the car, in my head—the singer’s face rises to the surface of things, demanding my attention as strongly as the melody, the band’s playing, the words and images. What’s that look on his face? He seems shocked by his own want. A little chastened, and angry, too, at lots of things.

In the “Out of the Box” column in the August 21, 1982 issue of Billboard, a Boston radio station music director’s quoted as saying that “Everywhere that I’m Not” has “the most irresistible hook line of the year.” A month earlier, in “Top Album Picks,” an anonymous Billboard writer enthused about Heartbeats and Triggers’s “vibrant progressive rock tunes” and their “strong percussive beat.” Well. We all have trouble translating mysteries. Look how much space I’ve taken up already.

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Meanwhile, it’s hard not hear in the background the Who’s “Disguises,” a kind of photo negative to “Everywhere that I’m Not.” Released on the Ready Steady Who EP in 1966, Townshend’s love song is also obsessed with confusions and vanishings, if of different, equally maddening sorts. The problem: the singer thinks that he knows everything there is to know about her, but when he points her out to a friend, a magic trick: he’s “picked the wrong girl again.” He thinks it’s her, but he can’t be sure. Disguised, she flummoxes him at every turn, one day dressed as a flower bed, the next recklessly directing street traffic wearing a wig and oversized shoes. Who’s doing the dissembling? She, playful and allusive (“I Can’t Reach You”)? His own loopy, love-starved imagination? (Or maybe—if the song’s trippy, droning, clanging arrangement suggests anything—his drugs?) He can’t pick her out in a crowd, though occasionally “a girl surprises me when she turns out to be you….”

The dark, demanding “Disguises” was never played onstage by the Who, and remains one of the band’s vastly underrated songs, another of Townshend’s loud, tuneful essays on slippery, shifting identities. A parallel universe b-side to Translator’s tune, “Disguises” narrates a like-spirited quest for the she who, inexplicably, goes away.

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The strong Heartbeats and Triggers album was unfairly burdened by the majesty of “Everywhere that I’m Not,” which didn’t achieve mainstream success, that painful old story, but enjoyed plenty of college and progressive radio airplay. (I first heard it, with the subsequent result of the top of my head lifting off and rotating, on WHFS 102.3 FM in Bethesda, Maryland.) There are several other solid songs on the album (and on the band’s subsequent records, with which I’m not as familiar as I could be). “When I Am with You,” “Nothing is Saving Me,” and “Favorite Drug” all share the lead cut’s desperate vibe, enlivened with arresting vocals by Barton and Darlington, tricky time changes, and a tightly wound, nervous energy pushing against formal constraint. If you haven’t listened to Heartbeats and Triggers beyond “Everywhere that I’m Not” and you dig early Taking Heads, the Strokes, and/or tuneful, jangly psychedelia, do yourself a favor and spend some more time with Translator.

In 2021, the original lineup of the band re-recorded the song, a superfluous exercise to my ears. Four decades on, Barton sings the lyrics with nearly the exact phrasing and emphases as on the original recording, the only noticeable difference being the slightly thin harmonies on the chorus where the original harmonies were stacked, and a controlled vocal in the last few bars with nary a screech, likely a concession on Barton’s apart to his aging vocal chords. Or to a different, equally universal turn of events: “I still play [the song] to this day,” he remarked to Torem a decade ago, “but the meaning of the lyrics has shifted as the years go by.”

Rocker magazine once asked Barton if being associated with one song only over the course of a long career was frustrating for him. “No,” he responded genially. “To me some people never have a song that breaks through.”

He added, “I’ll take the one everyday of the week.”