Polaroids

Just before she became a star in the mid-’90’s, Shawn Colvin released “Fat City,” a set of songs with one knockout after another, brilliantly produced by John Leventhal and Larry Klein. Listening to the radio in my car yesterday, I happened to hear “Polaroids,” the first song on the disk, and it grabbed me powerfully like a work of art can do when you least expect it. Set to a beautiful, languorous melody that borrows from “Son of a Preacher Man,” the lyrics are about as good as it gets this side of the Beatles or Bob Dylan:
“Now I am always amazed
Words can fill up a page
Pages fill up the days
Between him and me
But the vows that we never keep
From bedrooms to business-speak
Make me remember how cheap
Words can be”
Like so many fine things in life, the lyrics to “Polaroids” are available in their entirety (with the rest of the songs from “Fat City” and the most popup ads I’ve ever had to fight through on one site) for free on the Internet: “Polaroids lyrics.”

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