Ray Davies

If I were ever forced to choose the 10 most beautiful pop songs ever written, I'm certain there'd be one Ray Davies song among them. It's just a matter of choosing. I'm always instantly seduced by the wistful majesty of his 1968 "Days," a song that turns a failed affair into an everlasting kiss. "Days" doesn't so much tell a story as outline the shape of it; the episode is a secret preserved by the singer, but the joy its memory brings him is like a hymn that bursts in the air. "Days," like the Venus de Milo, is complete in its incompleteness. The beauty of what you don't see intensifies the beauty of what you can.

But it's "Waterloo Sunset" that always, on the 100th listening as much as the first, takes me apart and becalms me completely in the space of its three minutes. Before he became a professional musician, Davies entertained thoughts of going to art school; he'd also fallen in love with movies, and at one point he thought he might like to be a filmmaker. "Waterloo Sunset" is a kind of songwriting that borrows from filmmaking, in the way Davies uses visual details to draw a character's interior life out into the open.

The narrator of "Waterloo Sunset" is a man who looks out on the world from his window, taking particular interest in two lovers (like puppets or pets, he's named them Terry and Julie) who meet at the train station each Friday night. The lines "Dirty old river, must you keep rolling/flowing into the night/People so busy, make me feel dizzy/Taxi lights shine so bright" substitute for cinematography, painting a backdrop for the central action of the song, two lines that swoop down on you unexpectedly: "But I don't need no friends/As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset, I am in paradise."

The view from that window, like a scene encased in a snow globe, is the narrator's own personal work of art, a miniature world that seems quite good enough -- after all, there are lovers in it, so who can complain? But even as the singer sinks into the comfort of his armchair, the song's melody, wheedling and mournful at once, seems determined to convince him that there's more to the picture than what he can see. A guitar phrase repeated insistently hangs in the air, a half-formed suggestion -- it's tentatively playful, like a quizzical cocker spaniel framing a question that looks like "Out?"

But who really knows if Out is better than In? That's the question trembling at the heart of "Waterloo Sunset." Experienced in the world as we are, we think we know what's outside (good things as well as bad, but mostly good), and we want to take this recluse by the hand and bring him out, blinking, into the world -- to show him a view beyond his dirty old river, because we're so certain we know better. But "Waterloo Sunset" works a sweet little trick, fostering a persistent suspicion that the man in the armchair may be right, that maybe there is nothing so beautiful as what he sees outside his window. In the end, we have to leave him there, trusting that he knows best.

Davies is asking us to make a supreme leap of faith: To trust that this man is happy with the limits he's set for himself. It's our job, not his, to find happiness on the other side of the window. If he takes pleasure in looking out at us as we make our clumsy magic, then we've done right by him. It's the most we can give -- and the least we can do.

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