Song #585: "Separate Lives" by Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin

Date: Nov 30, 1985
Weeks: 1

After I reviewed "Say You, Say Me" (#587) by Lionel Richie, I was intrigued by the movie it was from. I thought it was odd that I'd never heard of it before. So I watched White Nights. It was an interesting movie, especially as a time capsule of the era it was from. Maybe there was a little too much dancing, and maybe the Soviet bad guys were a little too unsubtle, but the notion of setting a movie in a place and time where the sun never sets was an idea I'd never seen before, outside an episode of Northern Exposure. Anyway, I left feeling that the Lionel Richie song made a little bit of sense in the context of the movie. It's about two guys who feel alone, but find out they aren't that dissimilar.

This song, however, makes no sense in the context of the movie. This is clearly a breakup song, and no one in the movie has broken up. I suppose it may have some thematic similarities to Baryshnikov's character and his love interest (played by Helen Mirren), with the whole "you have no right to ask me how I feel" thing, but I don't recall it playing near their scenes. It played during a scene between Gregory Hines and Isabella Rossellini, and their relationship never went through anything like this. So it's an odd fit to this particular movie.

The overall theme is that two people have broken up, and they still care about each other a little, but they couldn't make their relationship work, so now they're trying to figure out how to be broken up and live their separate lives, when they still kind of want to be together. I suppose it's kind of an original idea for a song.

So after all that discussion of the subject matter, we get on to the music, which is generally pretty terrible. It's really slow, it's got that poundy 80s drum, it has a synthesized keyboard layered on top of a piano, as well as a string orchestra. It's a huge production for a pretty minimal song.

And the singers aren't very good. Phil Collins does a fine job making rock music most of the time, and he's got a decent voice for that, but he's not a particularly talented singer when it comes to singing over minimal music. I've never heard of Marilyn Martin in any other context, and I can sort of see why. She's not bad, but she pushes herself to sing bigger and louder than she really has the talent to support. They both come off sounding really whiny and angsty. And that's the problem. This isn't an "I want" song where somebody whines about what they want. This is supposed to be a song where two people are resigned to their breakup. It needs to be more restrained and sadder. Phil Collins is doing a better job at that, but they're both pretty wrong for this song.

My verdict: Don't like it. Here's Phil Collins performing this song with Laura Pausini and an acoustic guitar. It's a better song for having one better singer and simpler instrumentation. So this could be a better song if it weren't quite so mired in tropes of the 1980s.