The first seconds of I Keep Forgettin' are almost suspiciously smooth, as though everything had been agreed, accepted and sealed inside a safe form where nothing can slip or crack. The keyboards arrange the space with softness and precision, the rhythm carries the track without effort and Michael McDonald's voice enters with the certainty of somebody who knows exactly where he stands.
That is where the entire game begins. The appearance of control is not the truth but a practised, almost learned posture intended to cover what is really happening: a continual return to the point that should have been closed, processed and placed on the shelf beside all the other things one does not revisit.
The song does not move in a straight line. It circles, returns, turns back and tries once more to go forward, only to be pulled into the same place. Its elegance resembles the well-rehearsed role we play for the world when saying everything is fine, although nothing inside us has actually reached an ending.
Most interestingly, the music appears to contradict this. The rhythm section presses steadily on, never looking back or offering a hint of hesitation. The external world functions perfectly normally while the vocal remains in place, repeating, checking and trying once more to believe something already said but never absorbed.
The track does not tell a story from A to B. It shows a suspension in which everything is formally over and emotionally unfinished. That tension between movement and stasis gives the song far more power than a literal reading of its words ever could.
McDonald is essential because every line contains certainty and its absence at once, parallel forces neither of which can finally win. Even the smoothest phrase begins to develop a delicate crack.
The beautifully tailored jacket ceases to be a metaphor for the aesthetic and becomes something much less comfortable. It turns out to have been put on a little too early, before anything beneath it had properly settled.
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