Sometimes we do not return to the past. Sometimes we merely open an old conversation, scroll a few screens upwards and suddenly realise we are already there.
Last night I was reading messages exchanged with people I once saw more often, knew more closely or at least believed I knew. Some sentences had preserved the temperature of the moment. Others resembled props left behind after a performance whose ending nobody officially announced. There were jokes comprehensible only then, plans without a sequel, affection offered in passing and the certainty that the conversation would continue tomorrow.
Tomorrows can be exceptionally ill-mannered. They arrive, take people away and do not even close the messenger window behind them.
Somewhere between one message and the next, “Puppy Dog” returned. I have known The Shivers for a long time. I did not discover them today through recommendations, nor did a playlist pretending to offer a chance encounter place them before me. Their songs often lived in my ears during another period of my life. That is why this return did not feel like meeting a band. It felt more like opening the door to a room where somebody had left the light on.
“Puppy Dog” does not make a grand entrance. It needs neither a violent impact nor a melody demanding to be memorised immediately. The keyboards spread a soft, dim light, the rhythm moves without hurry and the voice remains close. There is soul warmth in it, but also something rough, as though every word had to squeeze its way through pride.
Keith Zarriello (vocals) does not sing like a man prepared to fight for love. He sounds more like someone who lost the fight long ago but still has not left the scene. He retains a trace of nonchalance, although emotionally he is already sitting outside the door, waiting for the smallest gesture.
The puppy in the title is not a sweet picture. He is chained in the backyard, receives whatever somebody happens to throw him and watches his beloved bring other men home. They even seem perfectly decent to him. The problem is that none of them will love her as faithfully as he does.
At this point the song could become grotesque. An adult comparing himself to a dog is asking for pity just as strongly as he is asking for affection. The Shivers do not attempt to rescue his dignity. They let him remain in that backyard, his eyes fixed on someone who stopped considering them an obligation long ago.
Loyalty looks beautiful for as long as it has somewhere to return. Deprived of reciprocity, it becomes a habit. A person no longer waits because something might happen. He waits because he cannot remember who he was before he began.
What hurts most is not the presence of other men. It is the acceptance of scraps. The protagonist will take any portion of attention as long as it comes from the right person. At the same time, he tries to persuade himself that such unconditional devotion makes his love greater. Perhaps it only makes it more defenceless.
The music does not stage an argument around this. It does not underline the humiliation with a dramatic gesture. It rocks it gently. The warm sound surrounds the words so tenderly that at first it is easy to miss how ugly the situation they describe really is. The melody strokes while the words tighten the collar.
“Puppy Dog” comes from the album Forever Is A Word, recorded in Brooklyn in 2014 on two-inch tape. Its analogue warmth is not an ornament impersonating a bygone era. It gives the song a body. The instruments do not shine separately but breathe the same air, like people locked together in a small room at night.
The album was released on 14 February 2015. It is difficult to imagine a more perverse date for a record on which love so often brushes against loneliness. Valentine hearts hang in shop windows, somebody buys flowers and somebody else waits for a message. The Shivers, meanwhile, look into a backyard where attachment has ceased to be a figure of speech.
Reading old conversations at night works in much the same way. First we see the words, but after a while we begin to hear our own voice from years ago. We recognise our humour, impatience, hopes and feelings we could no longer express in exactly the same way. The people on the other side of the screen may be far away today. The person we were while writing seems farther still.
Not every longing wants a particular person back. Sometimes we miss our own intensity, the ease with which we could give someone an entire afternoon, a night or the next several years. We miss the belief that loyalty would be enough to preserve closeness.
Old conversations show that it was not. “Puppy Dog” knew this from the beginning.
That is why the song sounds different years later, although its recording has not changed a single note. It is the listener who approaches it carrying another weight. Once he heard melody and romantic suffering. Today he also recognises dependency, hunger for attention and that peculiar kind of hope capable of surviving everything except fulfilment.
And yet it is difficult to turn away from that voice. It is too human to ridicule. Almost everyone has waited outside somebody's door at least once, even if it was not a real door. Sometimes a phone screen was enough, a green dot beside a name and a message left unanswered for several hours.
The Shivers do not undo the chain. They offer no exit and do not restore the protagonist's lost pride. They leave him where he was and allow the music to circle around his attachment.
Years later he is still sitting outside the door. Except that the house to which it led now exists only in the archive of conversations.
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