Cracking

It has to be intimidating, deciding which song to put first... on one's first album. This, after all, will be the first series of sounds the listener will hear and forever associate with that performer. It's a very powerful form of the "first impression" idea-- the firm handshake, sincere eye contact, and genuine smile that determine if you are going to like this person or not.

This speaker (we cannot assume it is the author, as a rule) chooses to start with an invitation: "Walk with me/ And we will see/ What we have got." Friendly enough.

But first she presents an ambiguity, an pronoun without an antecedent. "It's a one time thing," she says. Um, what is? Perhaps she means a first impression. It is a "one time thing"-- there is no second first impression. However, we are constantly meeting new people. We don't notice how special it is because it "just" occurs frequently.

The speaker, who has asked us to walk with her, then notes that her pace is "ticking." This could refer to the sound itself, but then why not "clicking," the sound often made by women's "footsteps"? Because they are so regular. They are coming one per second, like the ticks of a clock, or "water dripping from a tree." This happens after a rain, or perhaps a thaw. The choice of the image tells us that we are outside, or at least near a window. 

"Walking a hairline" likely has nothing to do with hair, but with a "hairline fracture." We can take this from the title, "Cracking," but also from the fact that, in general, people do not walk on hairlines in the "receding hairline" sense of the word. This is a more poetic way to say not that she is "walking on a thin line"-- or as the other cliche has it, a "walking a tightrope"-- but not on a thing at all, not a line or string or wire.

No, she is walking on a crack, a faultline, between two tectonic plates. The ground is cracking apart, and she is unsure as to which side she will choose. So far, the crack is just a hairline, and she can easily straddle the rift. So far. Perhaps that is why she is walking both rapidly-- one footfall per second-- yet also "very carefully," a word she enunciates in individual, ticking syllables.

Now we learn something about her emotional state. "My heart is broken," she says, and something about the way she delivers what must be the ultimate songwriting cliche-- the broken heart-- makes us hear it anew. The way she says this, it makes us think that, for the first time, the speaker truly appreciates this image. Her heart, like a teacup, has been shattered. The pieces are jagged and painful, and a beautiful thing is irreparably destroyed. The heart is also broken in the way a watch can be broken-- perfectly unchanged to the eye, yet now useless.

But then she continues, "It is worn out at the knees," like a pair of jeans, like something soft, not something brittle. How much time has her heart spent on its metaphoric knees for this to have happened? How much praying, begging... how much crawling? How much quick walking, as if walking away from the pain of the relationship?

Her heart is not working, and she details this: "Hearing muffled/ Seeing blind." Her heart is having a hard time processing input. She is becoming emotionally inert; she says, still of her heart, "Soon, it will hit the Deep Freeze" [sic]. It will come a solid lump of ice, in reaction to the fissure she treads.

While her heart is broken and her relationship is in break-up mode, she responds by trying to become solid, stolid, and stable.

It's not going to happen. "Something is cracking." Try though she might to respond to her situation by withdrawing, something is cracking. She can't even locate its source: "I don't know where."

She has a few guesses. "Ice on the sidewalk," which indicates that the dripping trees were in fact thawing, meaning that spring is imminent. This is also indicated by the ice breaking up underfoot. In fact, one of these cracks is likely the "hairline" she walked earlier that leant itself so well as a metaphor to her emotional state. Other things that could be "cracking" are "Brittle branches/ In the air." The branches died in the winter, but were held in place by the ice that killed them. Now that the ice is melting, the branches are free to snap off and fall.

She has been walking on the sidewalk, her shoes "ticking" on the hard cement. But now that the winter is ending, the Sun returns. After so much gloom, especially, she finds the Sun "blinding." Even her "blind" heart can sense the light, it is so intense.

And now what has been inert is now "dizzy." The colors we have had so far-- of black dead branches, gray sidewalks, and white ice-- are now overwhelmed by the Sun's "golden" rays.

And we have another color, "green." This new life is in motion as well, "dancing." She has reached "the park," where the grass and flowers and bushes and budding trees are waving in the spring wind.

The effect is irresistible. The sheer amount of energy she encounters-- light, color, movement, new growth-- has shattered her emotional inertia. Notably, it is "afternoon." The apex has been reached... and then passed. 

The Sun is glad to see her, but in the way a teacher is glad to see that a tardy student has finally arrived. The Sun scolds her, wants to know "where the hell" she has been. Doesn't she know she is supposed to be in the sunlight, where the life is? Why had she been wasting time in the "hell" of an emotional winter? What does she have to say for herself?

At the outset, the speaker told us something about a "one time thing." We thought it was the meeting itself, our first impression. But now, perhaps not. Perhaps she is telling us about the relationship, that a break-up situation "happens a lot," but that each time is unique, a "one time thing."

If the relationship caused her to withdraw emotionally to that point, we certainly hope that this one in particular was a one time thing.

IMPACT: 

Vega's eponymous debut went platinum in the UK, and also sold well in the US. 

Next Song: Freeze Tag