Eddie Money - Take Me Home Tonight

This song has literally too many cathartic moments to count. Literally. That's why I made this the key song on my own wedding playlist. No joke. I read the lyrics online and I get goosebumps. Holy shit.

Okay, there's the opening keyboard line, tight and melodic and minor and impossibly tense, matched with a guitar lead when it repeats. The snare drum enters, bigger and brighter than any of Max Weinburg's drum smashes on the "Born in the USA" album, and a vaguely japanese synth chops in from the side. Money starts singing, oh God damn does he ever start singing. He keeps saying "Hunger," and "APPETITE." He's walking the "CITY STREETS ALONE," and it seems like he's probably just going to sem-explode all over the side of a bus or something. The bridge, oh my god -- a positively huge power chord roars, Chak-ah-SHAAAAA. "I can hear you breathe; I can feel your heart beat faster (faster)..."

And the chorus. It feels like it's taken four painfully glorious hours to get to this point, but here we are..."!!TAKE! !ME! !HOME!! !TONIGHT!!!!" The raw furious desperation! Blasphemous sexual fury! Money's cashing in, and everything is great...right? Right? Well, not so fast, crackshot. Money doesn't have the capacity to mew the words, so he calls on the legendary Ronnie Spector to speak for him, begging his dream woman, "Be my little baby." And with that, we're right back where we started, like it was all a dream.

We go through the whole thing all over again. Nightmares, darkness, cold winds, it goes on for hours and hours while Money builds up the strength to scream again: "!!TAKE! !ME! !HOME!! !TONIGHT!!!!" The fantasy doesn't shake off so quickly this time, and a saxophone blasts in like a buzzsaw, giving sonic structure to the trembling in Money's fingers, the way he's biting his lip, completely terrified that he will never feel that human touch again. Spector's cooing is getting more involved as the dream forms more fully in Money's head, under that brilliantly illustrious head of hair.

He's gonna give it one more shot, and no bullshit this time. Just a man and his lead guitarist entering one final plea:

!!FUCKING!!
!!TAKE!
!ME!
!HOME!!
!!FUCKING!!!
!!!!TONIGHT!!!!"

And with that, Ronnie can't wait in the back any longer. Her voice blasts off and righteously leads the rest of the band to the coda of the song; a chorus that repeats forever, until the world ends. In fact, I'm pretty sure Money and the gang are still in the studio to this day wailing away on this track, beckoning a guardian angel dream woman from heaven. We never do find out if he finds that magic woman to turn his engine on, but the end of this song always sounded like resolution to me. And come on. If Money hasn't gotten what he needs based on this three and a half slice of masochistic pop bliss, there must be too little sex on the planet for humanity to sustain itself.