{Note: The Madonna Timeline is an ongoing feature, where I put the iPod on shuffle and write a little anecdote on whatever was going on in my life when that Madonna song was released and/or came to prominence in my mind.}

Seems I’ve played the game for much too long
I let people buy my love and I
Never got to sing my songs for you

I had all my bets laid all on you
Set your stakes too high, you’re bound to lose
In the game of love you pay your dues

Say that happiness cannot be measured
And a little pain can bring you all life’s little pleasures
What a joke

Summer in upstate New York is a sticky and uncomfortable affair much of the time. Nights, especially, drone on longer than necessary when the heat and humidity combine to make for difficult sleeping and restless nights. The summer of 1990 – which was the summer of Madonna’s Blond Ambition reign – found me hurtling from Amsterdam, New York to Washington, DC and Russia – then back again. It was, indeed, ‘Something to Remember’, and I do… I still very much do.

When last we left the ‘I’m Breathless’ entries of the Madonna Timeline, the question was ‘What Can You Lose?’ With ‘Something to Remember’, we return to that magical summer – a summer that could quite feasibly be one of my favorite summers of all time, as they don’t seem to be getting any better. There’s something profoundly sad in that, and yet inevitable, so I embrace the one from 1990 all the more warmly. 

That was the summer we went to the Soviet Union – my first plane ride anywhere – initiation by Aeroflot fire. That was the summer we returned to the corn already high again. That was the summer we almost grew up. One day I’ll try to more fully capture the trip to the then-Soviet-Union that we made then – for now there are only these hints of it.

I was not your woman, I was not your friend
But you gave me something to remember
No other man said love yourself
Nobody else can
We weren’t meant to be
At least not in this lifetime
But you gave me something to remember
I hear you still say, love yourself

At the not-so-ripe age of fourteen, I was just starting to awaken to the madness of adolescence and all the confusing thrills that were just around the corner. There were stirrings of attraction, but at that point I couldn’t tell friendship from romance, and honestly I was always looking for someone – anyone – to stave off the loneliness. 

Madonna was there with her blonde-tressed ambition in full-effect, but on the ‘I’m Breathless’ album there was this jazzy slow-burn song of lost love, and somehow I already felt I understand her pain in my own longing. Visions of a dimly-lit bar, smoke adrift in the air back when it could be, the way it was everywhere in Russia, crossed my mind when I listened to this, rushing toward adulthood as much as it struck a little bit of terror in me. 

I had all my bets laid all on you
Set your stakes too high, you’re bound to lose
In the game of love I’ve paid my dues

Guess I’m waiting for my place in your sun
Wish I had the chance to know you when it wasn’t stormy weather
What a shame, who’s to blame?

The song would haunt me when we returned home, when we went back to being stuck in a small town, back to when we were alone again. I would wake to the bright sun of summer and feel pangs of emptiness, having been on an exciting adventure and tasting what life could be, then suddenly plunged back into the summer before another year of high school, and another year of being trapped. And hunted. 

At night – those awful, restless, unending summer nights that somehow seemed darker than any night in winter – I would play this song, and dream of a glamorous existence which consisted mostly of whispered images, a sparkling tableaux parading fantastically across my mind, based in bits of movies, passages of novels, stories of decadence. It was my fledgling crafting of the life I would one day eventually lead, only when the time came I would not realize it. Only looking back can I see and almost feel its frisson. And mostly I’m glad for that – glad that I had that, and glad that I’m no longer in it. 

I was not your woman, I was not your friend
But you gave me something to remember
No other man said love yourself
Nobody else can
We weren’t meant to be
At least not in this lifetime
But you gave me something to remember
I hear you still say, love yourself

As the summer of 1990 came to its inevitable close, we returned to school. Things felt different again, the way they would for the next few years. Adolescence would shift the world in such irrevocable ways. We hung on as best as we could, but there were stumbles and falls. Madonna finished her Dick Tracy chapter, bid adieu to Breathless Mahoney, and by the end of the year she was onto ‘Justify My Love‘. It was a darkly beautiful road of more adult concerns, a daring and edgy period that wouldn’t let up until the turn of ‘Bedtime Stories’.

‘Something to Remember’ was also the name of Madonna’s first and thus far only collection of ballads, released in the fall of 1995 and primed to set the stage for her first glorious comeback in ‘Evita’. Much happened in the ensuing years since its release on ‘I’m Breathless’, and by the fall of 1995, summer – in all its forms and incantations – felt very far away. 

Song #167 – ‘Something To Remember’ ~ Summer 1990