Night Moves

Bob Seger was thirty-one when he wrote “Night Moves,” and he was writing about a summer when he was eighteen.

Thirteen years. That gap is the whole song.

The first half is the summer itself. The back seat. The drive-in. The girl with the black hair and the soft skin. Seger sings it with energy, almost joy, rebuilding the thing as it goes. You can feel the heat and the desperation and the certainty that this would last forever.

We weren’t in love. Oh no, far from it.

He says it plainly, so you don’t get it wrong. He isn’t romanticizing the girl. He’s romanticizing the wanting. The girl isn’t the point. The wanting is the point.

Then the tempo slows and his voice drops to almost a whisper, and the song leaves the summer behind. I woke last night to the sound of thunder. We aren’t in 1962 anymore. We’re in a bed at three in the morning, awake, doing the arithmetic. The summer is over. The girl is gone. The man lying there is somebody the boy in the Chevy wouldn’t recognize.

That’s what the thirteen years did. A young man can sing about a summer and mean the summer. A man at thirty-one sings about a summer and means everything that came after it.

Ain’t it funny how the night moves?

It isn’t funny. He knows it isn’t. He sings the line anyway, the way you say a thing out loud to keep from saying the heavier thing underneath it.

Thirteen years stand between the boy in the back seat and the man awake at three. Seger put both of them in the same five minutes, and let you hear the distance.