Song Interpretations
In My Room, The Beach Boys
March 29, 2007
In my continuing acquisition of everything Beach Boys I came to the album Surfer Girl, released in 1963. This album contains "In My Room".. a song that I can listen to over and over. The first line is perfect:
There's a world where I can go...
So brazen to simply label a room as a world! Rooms should be closed and confining.. when you are in trouble as a kid you are "sent to your room". But Brian Wilson is going to be describing a whole world.. a universe of personal meaning.
It is very much a young person's vision of life.. a room where you can be alone and have your thoughts all to yourself. It is exactly the small bedroom I knew while my family lived in Redlands. It was a small white cube where I slept and where I laid down and listened to my music or read something from an unending stream of books. Nothing was more highly anticipated than just being alone. It is weird to think back on those days, since I now look forward to coming home and seeing Emily (and Rory!).. not a room. But I can still remember the old relief of closing the door and being by myself.
In this world I lock out
all my worries and my fears
In my room
In my room
I doubt it is just me who can relate to Brian Wilson's sentiments. It strikes me as a pretty common part of American teenage life.. a shared experience that is delicately caught by Brian Wilson.
It is a sentiment that would not be so easy to understand for teenagers living in other place in the world. Listening to this song I have tried to recall the family I lived with in Morocco in the summer of 2001. Four kids in the house, the oldest being about 17 and the others ranging down from there. The hardest thing about staying here was my inability to get real alone time.. people were always coming up to talk.. the television was on loud. There seemed something unnatural to them about a person just sitting and staring. The "room-world" that I expect for myself was just not there.. and I don't think anyone knew what that was. Brian Wilson would find it hard, I think, to communicate his vision to that audience.
What goes on in this room-world?
Do my dreaming and my scheming lie awake and pray
Do my crying and my sighing laugh at yesterday
The room-world is described in thoroughly imaginative and emotional terms. There is no busy "doing" here. In a remarkably compressed two lines Wilson gives us no less than seven internal movements.
Lines like these wrap up the American house in emotional meaning:
Those lines require a certain spatial literacy to look at them and imagine walking into a simple American house. Note those three bedrooms.. one master and two smaller ones. In a thousand years such a floor plan may be as incomprehensible as the layout of the ancient city of Çatalhoyuk (7000 BC) is to us now.. In vain one tries to figure out how ancient people inhabited their dwellings.. to imagine the emotional resonance of their living set-up. If someone in a thousand years wants to understand the worlds inside our American dwellings, they could do no better than to give "In My Room" a close listen.. noting the emotional values settled firmly over spatial layouts.
As a coda to this post I should note how odd it is that the album Surfer Girl, containing the ultimate "interior" song, should simultaneously be concerned with songs that overtly map social identity.. notably "South Bay Surfer" and "Our Car Club". The latter song contains the following chorus:
We'll set a meet, and get a sponsor, and collect some dues
And you can bet that well have our jackets on wherever we cruise
That contradiction between interiority and group identification is a persistent issue in the music of Brian Wilson. What is interior can on the flipside become Ra Ra be true to your school!
more song interpretations:
Won't Get Fooled Again, The Who
My Sweet Lord, George Harrison
The Village Green Preservation Society, The Kinks
