An Arrow That Travels An Impossibly Long Distance

I spend a lot of time thinking about Liv Tyler and the guy who is her husband and the father of her child. I don’t know his name, he’s just The Singer From Spacehog. He was the guy from Spacehog, and then he was the guy with Liv Tyler, and that’s pretty much all he’s known for. He is a person who basically wrote one good song and magically parlayed it into this incredibly lucky relationship. Launched from a catapult and stuck the landing, miles away.

I mean OK maybe every night he pours his heart out to her on his acoustic guitar, and each song is just too heartbreaking and fleetingly lovely to ever put down on mp3. But I don’t know about that, I can only surmise and draw conclusions based on the information available to me in the public sphere. Call it judging, which is what this is all about, anyway.

So he writes this one song and ends up with Liv Tyler? Is that fair? I mean to call the guy a one-hit wonder would imply that the song was more widely popular than it ended up being, right? So not even a one-hit wonder, just a guy who wrote a good song. Except he didn’t even write a good song: he wrote a good chorus and duct-taped it into a song. The verses are a joke and the bridge is complete shit. And actually even the chorus isn’t that great: it’s just a good chord progression. The lyrics are—I’m being gentle if I say retarded.

A guy puts a couple of decent chords together, sprinkles them in vintage Bowie fairy dust, and gets to be in a what as far as we can tell is a lasting, loving relationship with Liv Tyler. Who, if you look at her in magazines, holy lovely; but she always struck me as the kind of woman who is probably emotionally fragile in real life. Like her face gets really mottled when she cries, and there’s just snot everywhere.

To sum up: a guy does the bare minimum to launch himself into the public consciousness, and ends up in a relationship with a possibly flawed but overall lovely woman.

Not bad, is it. Enough to hang a dream on.

Thanks for a good year.