Sweet dreams

I love Stevie Nicks. It's an instant reaction. Every time I hear Sweet Dreams, the words fly from my mouth.

Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused

"I love Stevie Nicks."

As people are wont to tell me, Stevie Nicks doesn't sing the song. It's Annie Lennox. The Eurythmics. I know this. Have known it for years, but still, whenever I hear the song, I say, "I love Stevie Nicks."

It all started with a boyfriend in college. Murph. If not for fighting, we would have had no relationship at all. I met him at the college paper. He was the sportswriter with caustic wit and a chip on his shoulder. I was a young copy editor who knew nothing about the news. Boys. Life.

The first words out of his mouth were "I hate it when girls wear hats like that. You need to bend the brim."

He took the hat, the brand new hat, off my head and cupped the brim, wrapping a rubber band around it. "Keep it like this for a couple of days and then you can wear it."

I stood there with hat head and burning dislike. He pushed every button in my little OCD head. Drove me nuts. We fought incessantly. We fought for the sake of fighting, about TV and movies and music. We fought about the weather. The temperature. The color of the sky.

Anything and everything brought out the bicker in us. We scared our friends – his roommate and mine dated for years. They couldn't stand to be around us. Neither one of us took it personally, though.

For the most part.

One day, at a bar, I think, or maybe in the newsroom, the Eurythmics came on.

Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree?
I travel the world
And the seven seas
Everybody's looking for something.

Absentmindedly, I said, "I love Stevie Nicks."

With a vein throbbing in his forehead, he replied, "Stevie Nicks doesn't sing this song."

"I know," I said. "But I love Stevie Nicks."

The vein popped even further as he attacked my logic or lack thereof. Annie Lennox. The Eurythmics. Music, in general. And I stood my ground. "But I love Stevie Nicks."

Every time I heard the song after that, hundreds of times throughout our tumultuous relationship, through college and beyond, I said the same. "I love Stevie Nicks."

Every time, a vein throbbed in his forehead and he went nuts. I don't think he ever figured out what I was doing.

These days, it's almost Pavlovian. I cannot hear it without thinking of Murph. The newsroom. College days and button-pushing. I love the song. And Stevie Nicks.


Tag: Music Sweet Dreams Relationships