I Forget My Body

Nada Surf “Rushing”

I could say that this is a really great soft rock song, but that sounds like I’m making fun of it, right? But it really is, and the quality of it highlights how difficult it can be to write in this mode without getting overly sappy and sentimental, or having the softness of the song completely overwhelm the rock of it. I hear a lot of Matthew Sweet in the melody of “Rushing,” but the arrangement is much more strummy, airy, and overtly romantic than what he’s normally up to. It isn’t just that this song is romantic, it’s unabashedly so, and Matthew Caws sings about falling in love with incredible earnestness. The music makes everything sound crisp and focused and idealized, emphasizing the sense that meeting this person has suddenly shifted this guy’s entire perspective on the world for the better. The lyrics address feeling cynical and closed-off before this moment, and you could paraphrase pretty much all of it as “I was blind, but now I see!”

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