History of a Song
I was at a popular girl's sleepover, confused by the invitation, happy for inclusion, a level of polite camaraderie missing the close intimacy needed to be my full self. It was exhausting to hold up just this one particular side of my personality, like holding up a dumbbell for an extended period of time.
There was another Liz in attendance, and I felt a way about her that anyone would feel to share a name with a more beautiful, more accomplished, more loved version of themselves. The only thing that linked us was name, a seemingly small but significant detail. Names are important. She exemplified the potential of three letters.
Liz was the present. Liz was cool. She wore Estes. She played softball. The wannabe skaters and delinquents loved her because she was funny enough to inspire camaraderie but unobtainable enough to inspire lust. She was loved by girls but also held that near impossible quality: disinterest in popularity.
I bring up Liz, my grade school foil, because she was best friends with the host and had an ease that only a real friend can have in another person's house—small talk with the mother, snack drawer gluttony, obvious rights to share the pull out couch with the host. This was my first adventure into the intimate lives of girls I watched at school, and I couldn't help measuring my own discomfort against Liz's ease.
Loud music is essential at a sleepover, popping CDs in and out of the stereo located in the den (rich friends always had dens), mouthing the words while gyrating in a dance circle. The house was maze-like, and it was easy to get lost in unfamiliar corners. I stumbled away from the main party to a home office on the second floor. Some of the party retreated to this room—breaking off into small bubbles from a larger mass is the bane of social gatherings. Schnapps and cigarettes, they were a thing, but this was a rare party with soda as drink of choice and not a mixer. We talked about boys and the things we did with them, but we are content to just to talk, not act, on those pubescent indiscretions, content in our adolescences for one night.
Some girls laid out on the floor, flung on the love seat, talking quietly amongst themselves. Liz sat in front of the desktop. The computer fan whirled. She sang along to a voice coming from the computer's large, desk speakers. I should mention that Liz was a decent singer—of course she was.
The song was unlike the Usher and Nelly Furtado of school dances; it did not have the shiny horniness of most 00s pop songs. This was something deep and intimate, the kind of song you listen to alone in your bedroom, but Liz played it for all of us. She had no qualms about singing alone. You can guess, the song was "Hide and Seek" by Imogen Heap. I requested she play it again. Conversation stopped. All of us under a brief spell. Heap was a sea witch, and we were lost sailors.
I would hear the song, again, weeks later on the iconic episode of The OC when Marissa Cooper shots Trey in order to save Ryan. All my OC-heads know this scene, and the general public is aware of the needle drop that comes in after the shot. SNL parodied it. That’s big!
Liz was on to something. The song transcends genre. It links all classes of millenials—whether parody or sincerity. Play it in a bar of 30 somethings, and I think you would be hard pressed to find one person who is not mumbling the words over the lip of their glass.
I would walk away unscathed if a gunman commanded I sing or die. The song is ingrained in my psyche, but I am going to be honest, I have no fucking idea what it is about. I know the lines as they come and go, but I've never taken the time to analyze the whole. So why not now?
Personal Analysis
Before diving into Wikipedia pages, I will give my impressions, a rough draft analysis:
First, we have the title, "Hide and Seek". Obviously, it evokes the childhood game. When I think of hide and seek, I think mischief, anticipation, and loneliness. Seeker or hider—it is mostly a solitary game dependent on the hiding spot, frantically searching or evading. Anxiety and then giddy fear that is cycled through in relative isolation until your space is burst through by the seeker.
The most memorable component to the track is Heap's auto-tuned voice. Excuse my ignorance because I don't know the technical term, but there is a technical echo to Heap's voice. Echos often evoke expansiveness, caverns, maybe loneliness. (We keep coming back to loneliness.)
Then we have the lyrics which build on the growing nostalgia, the search and pausing of the game: "oily marks appear on walls/ where pleasure moments hung before". A move, a memory.
The song switches tone in the second half. Less a collection of memories, it is the the bitter taste left after the passing of time. "Ransom notes keep falling from your mouth" and "no, you don't care a bit".
It could be the memory of love. It feels childish with the imagery and the call and response, like a nursery rhyme. Heartbreak follows movement, or lack thereof, and it could be a literal move or something more philosophical, packing the person away into a memory even though they leave "oily marks" on the places once occupied. The lyrics do not offer answers, but the mental action of labeling the wrongdoings of the past are an answer of their own. I imagine a person sitting on a train and watching the past grow faint in the distance of the horizon, still there but harder to see.
Genius Lyrics
Oh boy, I just looked up the history and meaning behind "Hide and Seek", and we've got a winner, winner, chicken dinner. Survey says, DIVORCED PARENTS.
I could not locate any official confirmation from Heap regarding the connection between divorce and the song—artists always like to keep the mystique—but the general consensus that it is related to the separation of Heap’s family as a child.
Online lyric critics postulate that the song is about the splitting of a family around divorce or some other equivalent childhood trauma like a death. This solidifies some of the earlier points made because childhood trauma is universal, the levels of severity differing. We are all holding on to little things—"trains and sewing machines"—seemingly random observations that turn into truth as we age. It explains the unwavering relevance of the song even after almost two decades, and why the creators of last year's Normal People decided to include it in a scene or Jason Derulo sampled it.
Why this song?
Why did Liz feel the calling to play this song to sugared teens? Why did The OC creators select this song for a pivotal death? Maybe it is the quiet simplicity in a world dominated by instrumentals and synth. Maybe the melancholy self-indulgence, bursting with teen angst, triggers an animal response towards nostalgia.
I wonder if Liz ever thought about the impact of this song. Was she thinking about it at that moment? Did she feel like a messenger? I wonder what version of herself she thinks about it when she revisits it now, if at all.