Falling stars and the 'future-present'

Why I find a late 1980s pop song so enchanting

Photo by Eric Nopanen on Unsplash

What is your current ‘waiting’ anthem? Honest answers only, please - we'll swap more credible playlists at a later date. Because I'll level with you: the song that's been looping round my brain for the past fortnight or so is a good deal sillier than last week's post (which you can read here if you missed it).

Three words, my friends. Boy Meets Girl. 

You know the one:

"I hear your name whispered on the wind
It's a sound that makes me cry
I hear a song blow again and again
Through my mind and I don't know why…”

Waiting For A Star To Fall is Magic FM catnip. The track has every ingredient a late 80s rom-banger ought to: tinkly intro, plentiful synth, wistful bridge, mega sax solo, and the kind of brooding lyrics just made for lip syncing from the backseat of your parents' car while pretending you’re in a music video. (The actual video? A doozie, btw).

And if it sounds like it should have been sung by Whitney Houston, there's a reason. It was originally written for her.

Husband and wife duo George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam, aka Boy Meets Girl, had already penned two of Whitney's earlier hits, How Will I Know and I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me). Taken together, these three songs from consecutive years (1986/87/88) map the full landscape of romance pending - uncertainty, loneliness, longing - while each managing to be a certified bop.

But Whitney (or her people) opted out of making it a triptych. And Belinda Carlisle, who got next dibs on Waiting For A Star To Fall, inexplicably cut it from her album, too.

Happily, it ended well for Boy Meets Girl, who went on to record the song themselves and bag a hit of their own. You could say it was written in the stars. As Merrill told the Guardian's How We Made column in 2021, inspiration struck while the couple were watching Whitney perform at LA’s open air Greek Theatre:

“After she sang How Will I Know, I glanced up and there was a shooting star in the night sky above the amphitheatre. I pulled out my notebook and wrote down: ‘Waiting for a star to fall.’ It felt like a sign from the heavens.”

I absolutely love this mythology (see the full interview for more of the creative process), especially as I've just read Katherine May's Enchantment, which features another prominent and historic starfall. 

May's book, a follow up to her bestselling Wintering, is a personal treatise on the challenge of the present moment, tracking the author's attempts to rouse herself from the desensitising stupor and burnout of these past few pandemic years by reconnecting to nature and its elements. As you might expect from May, it's also full of family, memory and history, with some wild swimming thrown into the mix.

And hierophanies, a word new to me (I had to look it up), meaning manifestations of the sacred. In the chapter, The Night the Stars Fell, May recounts the extraordinary Leonids meteor shower of 1833, via firsthand accounts of those who witnessed it. Depending on your 19th century world view, it was either a scientific phenomenon to be understood or a spectacular sign from God.

Over the course of her book, May allows for both kinds of observance, while suggesting that it doesn't really matter how you interpret this stuff - the key is the noticing. She argues that by switching into our surroundings, we switch ourselves (back) on in the process, enabling consciousness and creativity to flow. Which might be just what we need in this moment. It worked for Boy Meets Girl.

I think I first heard Waiting For A Star To Fall during the closing credits of another millennial classic, the early 90s romcom Three Men and A Little Lady. Certainly on VHS and very possibly at a sleepover or summer sports camp. Either way, it locked into my subconscious the way some songs do. 

Looking back, it was another moment when life felt pending. I couldn't wait to be a teenager: to get breasts, start my period, fancy a real human boy; all the standard Judy Blume territory (never mind that when I got there, I felt pretty overwhelmed). I was 10 when my ma told me I could have a proper party for my 13th birthday. The wait felt interminable, and was soundtracked by pop yearning. Wouldn't It Be Nice by the Beach Boys. You Can't Hurry Love by The Supremes. I was a Capital Gold listener at the time (très cool, I know). And yet here I was, fixated on the future.

Some three decades later, I find myself in an oddly comparable headspace, and once again waiting on my period. Depending on the stage of an IVF cycle, you're either willing a period to arrive so you can start your injections or praying it doesn't and that the process has worked. It's an experience both intensely of the body and, at times, so far removed from it that the thing you're hoping for might as well be magic… or a falling star.

And this, it strikes me, is the time trap of pending. Caught in heightened expectation of the near future, you risk getting locked in a perpetual present, unable to move forward until the thing you want is here.

“I wish I didn't feel so strong about you / Like happiness and love revolve around you.”

Which is to say that it's actually been fun to backtrack a bit today. Nostalgia will always be my comfort zone, especially when this weird, ‘future-present’ tense of pending throws me for a Christopher Nolan style loop. If you're experiencing something similar or, like May, are struggling with disconnection or uncertainty of another kind, you may find Enchantment a grounding read right now.

As the author writes:

"Certainties harden us… we are better off staying soft. It gives us room to grow and absorb, to make space for all the other glorious notions that will keep coming at us over a lifetime."

Failing that, I prescribe you a big blast of Magic FM. It usually does the trick.

While I wait this week

I'm starting: US author Curtis Sittenfield's novel, Romantic Comedy, hot on the heels of watching a homegrown one, Rye Lane, and falling in love with David Jonsson’s face, 100 times over. It's still in cinemas, including the Ritzy in Brixton (where the multiple face scene was filmed). Catch it while you can.

I'm being served: a load more 80s and 90s cheese, thanks to Spotify's algorithm. Phil Oakley and Georgio Moroder's Together in Electric Dreams, Wilson Phillips' Hold On…all good tunes, but I think I need your waiting song recommendations, pronto.

I'm eating: all the chocolate. Or I will be by the time you're reading this. Lent felt like an unnecessary slog this year, and Easter couldn't come soon enough. I hope you're having a restorative weekend, however you've spent it. And long may this sunshine continue.

lucyfives

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