The Blue Nile – Let’s Go Out Tonight
Gentle melancholy at its best. Let’s Go Out Tonight has the feel of a late, rainy evening, more like the last jazzy ballad of the night, sitting on the last bus home, watching city lights, their promises that always seems to slip away. And yet it’s full of hope. The evening is still ahead.
The narrator senses that something is wrong, maybe the relationship isn’t quite what it was supposed to be. But there’s the question: what’s so wrong tonight? It could be simple ignorance that is the root of the problem, inability to communicate or to empathize properly, seeing that your partner is troubled but not understanding the reasons.
Yet, another way to see it is that it’s willful ignorance, turning a blind eye on what is supposed to trouble us, since on the cosmic scale all our problems are very small. And they could also be small when considering the relationship as a long narrative. What we’ve gone through together, the moments we might still have. The city with countless cars, time passing ceaselessly, speeding minutes and hours that shouldn’t be wasted on worrying about nothing. And how often the things we worry about are actually nothingness, just stories we could discard in favour of something happier, more hopeful, more loving.
The song leaves the situation uncertain. Is the relationship ending? What really matters is this moment of hope, praying for love to exist, to survive. Capturing these moments of transition feels very human. We know that something is changing, and maybe hope alone is enough to ensure something positive is coming. Where is the place where everything’s alright? Right here in the heart, in the depths of your own hope.