Eurythmics — We Too Are One

Wow, this came out at an interesting time: September, 1989. I am super surprised that I even own this, for a whole bunch of reasons.

First, I hadn’t loved the previous record, Savage, even at the time. Whatever that was, I certainly didn’t want more of it. Also, only one single from this did anything in the US (and it wasn’t one of my favorite songs from the record). Maybe there were videos, but we didn’t have cable in either of our apartments . . . which is another reason I’m surprised I have this.

Because September 1989 was when I moved to Albany, on my own, leaving Lee behind in Syracuse while I served in a fellowship with the New York State Senate. There was no certainty that this 10-month assignment would turn into anything long-term (spoiler: it did), but it was my only prospect after finishing grad school and landing in the midst of a weakening economy that was quickly drying up government jobs. We downsized our Syracuse apartment, took on a second cheap-as-livable apartment in Center Square in Albany so that I could walk to work, and commuted to see each other on the weekends. (Can’t recommend living apart from your spouse. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the only time we had to do that.) Money was tight. I basically lived like a monk, followed the age-old tradition of fellows and interns living off of food served at legislative receptions.

The CD player remained in Syracuse; the turntable and tape deck came with me to my dismal fourth-floor walkup on Chestnut Street. And that is the reason that in 1989, when I had been buying most of my new music in CD form for the past three years, I was suddenly buying some vinyl again — because it would give me something I could play in my Apartment of Loneliness. But even at that, I only bought a handful of LPs that year. This one, Bonnie Raitt, a Marc Almond single, a Ray Charles record, and Fetchin Bones. So this was really among the very last pieces of vinyl I would buy as part of my regular collecting; there were just a few more in 1990. So you could say my record collecting ran about 17 years, from 1972 to 1989. After that, every now and then I’d pick up something here or there, but not regularly, until a random stop into a used record tore in Burlington in 2011 suddenly brought the rush of collecting back to me, and set me up for a much more aggressive collecting streak once we moved to Phoenixville in 2014. Since then, well . . . space is becoming a problem, one must admit.

I like this much better than “Savage.” The title track is classic Eurythmics, and “The King and Queen of America” and “(My My) Baby’s Gonna Cry” both sound more like the “Be Yourself Tonight” era, much more to my taste. There are other good tracks on this as well, so I’m much more likely to put this on if I’m in a Eurythmics mood. But as i said before, they’re not an evergreen sound for me. I like three of the four records I have by Eurythmics, but they don’t really evoke deep feelings from me.