“I got a lot of your records,
In a separate stack,
Some things that I might like to hear,
I guess I’ll give ’em back.”
— “Box Full of Letters,” Wilco
It seems that the Fourth of July weekend has become a popular time to become engaged. I know of two couples who announced the big news after an Independence Day proposal this year. Congrats and here’s wishing them many years of health and happiness together.
But I remind the betrothed that you’re not just marrying another person, you’re marrying their record collection! I found this out more than three decades ago, and in honor of our 31st anniversary this month, I will review “The Head on the Door,” a standout LP from one of my wife’s favorite bands, The Cure.
Before we get to that, let’s look at the merging of musical collections — whether analog or digital — that happens when two people fall in love.
For Cathy and I, back in the stone ages, it meant trading favorite albums or making mix tapes of favorite music to exchange. We still have some of those mix tapes, even though there’s no cassette players still around in our house to play them.
Way back in the beginning, as a way to get to know each other better, we traded cassette albums. I let her listen to “Permanent Waves” by Rush (“I think my brother has that one,” she noted) and she gave me her copy of “The Circus” by Erasure. The synth-pop of Andy Bell and Vince Clarke wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, but I listened to it and politely noted their strong singing voices. And she refrained from comparing Geddy Lee’s voice to Donald Duck getting electrocuted …
Anyway, more than 35 years since we began dating, my wife and I have found some common ground musically, attending concerts of bands we both like (Dave Matthews Band, the Killers) and tolerating favorites of the other person (Built to Spill, Wilco, Michael Franti). Cathy is a huge Prince fan, and going to see him together in 2000 is one of my top 5 concert experiences — he was a tremendous performer and probably the best guitarist I’ve ever seen live.
But instead of reviewing a Prince album (or Erasure, for that matter), I flipped through her box of LPs to find The Cure’s sixth album, released in 1985.
Best known for their later hits “Just Like Heaven,” “Lovesong” and “Friday I’m in Love,” Robert Smith and his British bandmates began cranking out their moody, Goth rock soundtrack in the late 1970s, and they’ve kept going (with a few lengthy breaks) into the 2020s, issuing their 14th album, “Songs of a Lost World,” last year. And it sounds pretty good! (I’m not just saying that to earn brownie points, either).
Anyway, back to the mid-1980s and “The Head on the Door.” After hearing it for the first time in a very long while, what struck me was, one, how good the two singles from it sound, and two, how rocking some of the album tracks are as Smith churns out the riffs on his guitar.
Those singles — album opener “In Between Days” and side two’s “Close to Me” — illustrate the range of styles present on “Head on the Door,” with the upbeat and uptempo “In Between Days” charging onto the singles chart on both sides of the Atlantic. It was the first Cure song to reach the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the U.S. and, for me and many other non-diehard fans, the first Cure song most of us heard.
“Close to Me,” on the other hand, is a breezier tune with high-pitched, staccato guitar notes, goofy synthesizer riffs, horns and hand claps augmenting the bouncy beat. It featured a weird video showing the band stuffed inside a wardrobe placed precariously on the edge of a high oceanside cliff in England. Look out below!
Listening to the record in 2025, I enjoyed Smith’s flamenco-style guitar playing on “The Blood” and his effect-laden solo on “Screw.” Lyrically, the latter song is not what you might think (this isn’t a Van Halen album) … while there are a few sexual references, its narrator also talks about someone who screws up their eyes, their face and “keep(s) changing your shape.”
(As someone who wore weird clothing and quite a bit of makeup himself, Smith knew what he was talking about!)
Like many albums I have reviewed here, “The Head on the Door” ends with a final-song standout. “Sinking” allows The Cure’s other players — especially bassist Simon Gallup and drummer Boris Williams — to lay down a slinky groove and jam a bit before Smith belts out a sad tale (“So I trick myself, like everybody else. The secrets I hide, twist me inside. They make me weaker.”)
Did Cathy turn me into a huge Cure (or Depeche Mode or Erasure) fan? No. And I did not convince her to appreciate the unbelievable musicianship of Rush or Yes, either. But that’s OK. When you meet someone and fall in love, it’s never a perfect match. There are bound to be differences — who wants to date a clone of themselves, after all?
When the chemistry is right and the connection endures, a merged music collection becomes one of the many shared experiences that make a long-term relationship special.
A little bit of 1980s goth rock and synth pop (and a whole lot of classic rock guitar nerdiness) went together like a horse and carriage for Cathy and I. Here’s hoping those engaged couples we know will see their merged playlists live happily ever after.
