The Women in Famous Songs Respond

From Maggie May to Stacy’s Mom to Beth, the women immortalized in classic lyrics finally tell their side of the story.

I was driving with my teenage son the other day, when “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” came on the radio, and we both listened to it in the way you listen to a song you’ve heard a hundred times but never actually heard. About two minutes in, my son said, “Wait. This guy is kind of a dick.” He wasn’t wrong.

The sailor in the song tells Brandy she’d make a fine wife, that she’s wonderful, that any man would be lucky to have her, and then explains that he won’t be that man, because he belongs to the sea. He sails away, and somehow ends up the romantic hero of the whole situation. Brandy, as far as the song is concerned, just has to stand there and take it.

“Why doesn’t she get to respond?” my son asked.

That’s not always how music works, I told him. The guys with the guitars usually get the final word.

“That doesn’t seem fair. The women should get to tell her side of the story.”

What if they’re not even real? I asked. What if they’re fictional?

He thought about it for a second. “Especially then.”

He was right. So here we are.

“Maggie May,” Rod Stewart, 1971

Maggie Responds

Oh my fucking god, are we still talking about this? Okay, fine. He describes it like it was an Amber Alert. I gave him a lift from a party, we ended up back at my place, and then the cheap little bastard simply never left. That’s the whole story. I didn’t lure him into my car like some pedo. I offered him a lift in the rain and somehow that became a federal kidnapping case set to acoustic guitar.

You want to know how much he contributed to the utility bills in all the months he lived in my house? Zero. Not a goddamn penny. Every time I brought it up, he’d do that little shimmy and give me the smoldering look and say something obnoxious like, “Duh ya think I’m sexy?” I’d think, okay, I guess that’s charming, but Con Edison does not accept smoldering looks as payment, and neither does my landlord.

The “using” accusation is the one that genuinely makes me want to overturn a table. I paid the mortgage. I bought the groceries. I drove forty minutes on a Thursday to get him a specific brand of guitar strings because the shop in town didn’t stock them. I did this without being asked, because I am a generous person who made a catastrophic error in judgment. He ate my food, slept in my bed, left his wet towels on the bathroom floor in a way that suggested he had never encountered a towel rail in his natural life, and contributed to this household exactly nothing except himself, which, I’m sorry, is not the transaction he seems to think it is. His sexual enthusiasm does not offset six months of electricity.

And then there’s the morning sun line. “The morning sun, when it's in your face, really shows your age.” Holy fuck, dude! He sang that! He recorded it and put it on the radio, this man I fed six nights a week without once saying a single unkind word about his hair, which was — and I want to be precise here — a great deal of hair.

He wants to write a song about being the innocent party, corrupted by an older woman, dragged into something he never chose. I understand the impulse. God knows I do. But some of us don't get to write the song. Some of us just get to be in it. For a man so committed to the narrative of his own innocence, so determined to cast himself as the victim of someone else's appetites, he has been remarkably quiet about certain allegations involving his own appetites and a very large quantity of seminal fluid from naval personnel in San Diego, the details of which I will not repeat here because I am a person of discretion.

Which is more than I can say for his publicist, and more than I can say for him, and considerably more than I can say for the song he put on the radio about the wrinkles around my eyes.

“Roxanne,” The Police, 1978

Roxanne Responds

He says he wouldn’t talk down to me, and he says this in a song where he does nothing but. Every line is an instruction. Don’t wear the dress. Don’t put on the red light. Put away the makeup. Those days are over. He’s decided my days are over, this man I met three weeks ago outside a café in the 9th arrondissement who asked me for a cigarette and then stood there for forty-five minutes telling me about his bass guitar. I did not ask for a life coach. I was simply standing on a street in Paris, which is a thing a person is allowed to do.

The “I won’t share you with another boy” line is the one that keeps me up at night. He’s twenty-six years old and plays in a band that can’t get arrested in England, and he’s going to stand outside my window and announce to the whole neighborhood that he refuses to share me, as though I’m a bicycle or a particularly good sandwich.

He loves me, he says. He loved me since he knew me, he says. He has known me for three weeks. One of those weeks he spent in Brussels. What he loves is the idea of me, which is a woman who needs to be told what to do by a man with a guitar and a lot of feelings about right and wrong. I have some news for him about right and wrong. In this economy, in this city, it is not his place to have opinions about how I pay my rent.

And this is the part that nobody ever mentions: he’s English. He came to Paris, to my neighborhood, to my street, and decided within a fortnight that he understood my life well enough to write a song explaining it back to me. The song is very catchy, I’ll give him that. My name is now famous in a dozen countries. None of those countries have sent me any money, which is more than I can say for the clients he finds so objectionable.

Sting got a recording contract, and I got called by my name on the radio for four minutes, in a song about how I should do what he says. He said he wouldn’t talk down to me. I’m still waiting.

“867-5309/Jenny,” Tommy Tutone, 1982

Jenny Responds

Let’s start with where he found my number, because he mentions it himself and apparently sees nothing wrong with it. It was on a bathroom wall. Not a napkin slipped into his pocket at a party, not the back of a matchbook from a nice dinner. A bathroom wall, under “for a good time call,” in what I can only assume was a men’s room, because that is where these things are written.

He called the number on a dare, we went on a few dates, and then he wrote a song about it and put my phone number on the radio. I want you to sit with that for a moment. My home phone number. On the radio. In 1982, when there was only the radio.

He says he knows I’ll think he’s like all the others who saw the number on the wall. He’s right that I’d think that, and the reason I’d think that is because it’s true. He’s exactly like all the others, with the specific distinction that the others didn’t then record a fucking album.

He also says he tried to call before but lost his nerve, which he includes as though it’s romantic, as though the correct response is to find it endearing that a man spent weeks psyching himself up to call a number he found in a toilet. In this song, that’s apparently what love looks like. I have a different word for it.

The number itself is the part nobody wants to talk about. Every area code in America had a 867-5309, which means the song didn't just follow me around. It followed every stranger who happened to share my digits, people who’d never met Jim Keller, never been to that bar, never written their name on any wall anywhere. A radio station in Chicago got the number reassigned to them deliberately, answered 22,000 calls in four days, and considered that a success. Nobody asked any of us.

Jim Keller called on a dare, dated me for a few months, and then handed my phone number to the entire country like it was his to give. I have thought about that a lot over the years.

“Beth,” KISS, 1976

Beth Responds

“Just a few more hours.” That’s what he said. That’s what he always said, and I want you to notice something about how this song ends, which is not with him coming home. It ends with “me and the boys will be playing all night,” which is the same information delivered in a more honest way, and I appreciate the honesty, I do, but it does arrive rather late, after two verses of “just a few more hours” and “I’ll be right home to you,” which were not true.

He asked “Beth, what can I do?” twice. I’ll tell you what he could do. He could be a fucking man and come home. That’s it. That’s the whole answer. It fits in the song. There was room.

What nobody tells you is that the song was originally written to make fun of me. Not me specifically, but a woman exactly like me, calling the studio while the boys were playing, and they thought it was so funny, a woman wanting her husband to come home, that they wrote a song about it. Then somebody had the idea to add an orchestra and slow it down and make it sentimental, and suddenly it’s a love song, and women all over America are crying in their cars while their husbands use it to explain why they need to go out. That is what this song did. That is its documented legacy. I looked it up.

He says he knows I’m lonely. He says he hopes I’ll be alright. I’ve been hearing variations of “I hope you’ll be alright” for going on fifty years now, from a man in face paint who couldn’t find the sound, and I am here to tell you that hoping someone will be alright is the least a person can do, and he did exactly that, and then went back to playing, and I was there alone, and the house still wasn’t a home, and nobody wrote a song about that part.

“Stacy’s Mom,” Fountains of Wayne, 2003

Stacy Responds

He used to come over after school and I thought it was because he liked me. That’s what I thought. I was fifteen. He would sit by the pool and ask me questions about my mom — where she was, when she was getting back, whether she was seeing anyone — and I genuinely believed he was just being friendly, just taking an interest in my family, because that is the kind of thing you believe when you are fifteen and someone is paying attention to you.

Then the song came out and I had to go to school, and I want you to understand what it is like to walk into a high school in 2003 when the most popular song on the radio is about how the boy you liked thinks your mom is a smokeshow, and everyone has heard it, and some of them are singing it in the hallway, and you still have three years left before you graduate.

The detail that gets me, the one I keep coming back to, is that he noticed my dad had walked out and concluded that my mom could use a guy like him. Let’s be clear, she needed someone to help with the mortgage and fix the gutters and be a present and functional adult in a house that had recently lost one. What she got, according to this song, was a sixteen-year-old who smelled like Axe body spray, once wore the same hoodie four days in a row, and had not yet developed the emotional maturity to get through a Tuesday without an unprompted erection in third period.

My mom had just lost a husband. This boy couldn't keep a houseplant alive. The song went to number twenty-one on the Billboard Hot 100, which means several million people heard him explain that the worst thing that ever happened to my family gave him a boner.

My mom thought the whole thing was funny. She still does. She was never in any danger of taking him up on it, but she got a kick out of the song, which I suppose is easy when you’re the one who’s got it going on. Nobody wrote a song about what it’s like to be the daughter. Nobody thought that was the interesting part. I’m here to tell you it was.

“Same Old Lang Syne,” Dan Fogelberg, 1980

Jill Responds

He describes it like it was a Hallmark movie. The snow falling, the chance encounter, the long-lost lovers reconnecting over a shared six-pack in the frozen Christmas Eve air. What actually happened is that I was standing in a convenience store in Peoria, Illinois, at eleven o'clock at night on Christmas Eve in my coat over my pajamas, because my mother-in-law had sent me out for antacids and my husband had declined to go himself, and that’s the romantic backdrop where I ran into Dan Fogelberg and my life became a stupid mid-tempo soft rock anthem.

He touched me on the sleeve in the frozen foods aisle and I spilled my purse. His song got that much right. Then we bought a six-pack and sat in my car for two hours because every bar in town was closed, and I want you to hold that image for a moment. Not the movie version. The actual version. Two people from high school in a cold car in a strip mall parking lot in central Illinois, working through a six-pack because there was nowhere else to go.

The song says my husband was an architect. He was a PE teacher. I don’t know where Dan got architect, but I suspect “she married a PE teacher for security” didn’t scan as well. He also gave me blue eyes. I have green eyes. I understand that artistic license exists, but it is a particular experience to hear yourself described on the radio with the wrong eye color and the wrong husband’s profession, and to be unable to say anything about it for five years because you don’t want to disrupt someone’s marriage, which was more consideration than the song extended to mine. He told the whole story. I kept quiet. That is what actually happened.

What the song leaves out is the part after the fourth beer, which I will not detail here except to say that the answer to his request was no, and also that he cried, which the song does acknowledge, sort of, in that way where it sounds meaningful and poetic rather than what it actually was, which was a grown man weeping in a Buick on Christmas Eve in a parking lot in Peoria.

I felt terrible for him. I also felt ready to go home. The song ends with him watching me drive away into the snow, which turned into rain, and which he found beautiful and melancholy. I found it a Tuesday. He has since tried to friend me on Facebook, and I have thus far chosen not to respond, which is the one part of this story that remains entirely mine.

“Jolene,” Dolly Parton, 1973

Jolene Responds

I was a bank teller. I want to start there, because I think it provides some necessary context for a song in which I am described as an existential threat to the institution of marriage. I wore a name tag. I processed deposits. I was pleasant to customers because that was my job, and being pleasant to customers at a bank in Tennessee in 1972 is not the same thing as being a femme fatale, and I would like that distinction acknowledged before we go any further.

He came in regularly, her husband, and yes, I was friendly to him, because I was friendly to everyone, because I worked in customer service, and if Dolly Parton wanted to write a song about everyone I was friendly to at that bank she would have needed a double album.

The song describes me as having flaming locks of auburn hair, ivory skin, eyes of emerald green, a smile like a breath of spring, and a voice soft like summer rain. I appreciate the write-up. What it does not mention is that I was twenty-three years old, making $9,000 a year, and going home every night to a studio apartment in Nashville where I ate cereal for dinner and watched television until I fell asleep on the couch. I was not seducing anyone. I was surviving.

The gap between who I actually was and who this song decided I was is roughly the distance between a bank teller in Nashville and a mythological temptress who moves through the world destroying marriages simply by existing, and I have spent fifty years living on the wrong side of that gap.

Here is the part that really gets me. My name is not Jolene. Dolly took that from a little girl she met at a concert, an eight-year-old with red hair who asked for an autograph. So the song does not even have the correct name. The actual me, the real woman who processed Carl Dean’s deposits and said hello and meant nothing by it, does not appear in the song at all.

What appears is a composite: my hair, my height, my general existence, and a child’s name, assembled into a warning that has now been recorded by Beyoncé, covered by the White Stripes, and played at approximately every wedding, funeral, and karaoke night in the English-speaking world for half a century.

I cashed checks for a living. I have been a villain ever since.

“Darling Nikki,” Prince, 1984

Nikki Responds

He called me a sex fiend. In the first line. Before he even finished introducing me to the audience he had already diagnosed me, which I found presumptuous given that he is the one who followed me home.

I was in a hotel lobby, minding my own business. He approached me. I offered him a choice and he made his decision with what I would describe as very little hesitation, and then we had a perfectly nice evening, and in the morning I had somewhere to be, so I left a note, because I was raised right, and the note said thank you and included my number in case he wanted to call, which is more consideration than most people extend after a one-night stand, and somehow I am the cautionary tale.

The Parental Advisory sticker is the part I find genuinely difficult to process. Tipper Gore heard this song and decided the problem was me. Not the man who wrote a song about a woman he met once and followed home and then publicly described as a sex fiend and begged to come back on a major record label. Me. My behavior. My castle, my devices, my magazine. The United States government convened hearings. The entire music industry changed its labeling practices. And I left a thank you note. I want that on the record. I left a thank you note and the man still made an album about it.

What really gets me is the ending, where he’s screaming for me to come back. Your dirty little Prince wants to grind, he says, approximately nine times, which is nine more times than I ever said anything like that to him, because I am a person who knows what she wants and also knows when she has gotten it and is ready to move on with her day.

He signed the dotted line. I did not forge his signature. He was there voluntarily, he had a wonderful time by his own account, and when it was over I thanked him and left my number, and he wrote a song about it that changed federal consumer protection law. I have been on that Parental Advisory list since 1985. I left a thank you note.

“Come On Eileen,” Dexys Midnight Runners, 1982

Eileen Responds

Every October I think about moving. Not because of the cold, not because of the leaves. I actually like the leaves. It's the costumes. Sometime around the third week of the month they start appearing, and they always, always find me.

I’ve stood at Halloween parties and watched people explain the costume to each other, the slow recognition crossing their faces, the laughter. I have smiled at this. I have laughed along. I’ve done this for forty years because what’s the alternative?

The song itself is almost impressively presumptuous. He tells me my thoughts verge on dirty. His thoughts verge on dirty, but apparently we’re sharing now, without my having been consulted. There’s a backing vocal that literally instructs me to tell him yes, as though the song required a second voice to finish the persuasion he’d started.

He comments on my dress. He comments on my body. He notes that I’ve grown, which is the sort of observation that sounds almost sweet until you realize what he means by it, which is that he’s been waiting, and that now I am sufficiently grown for the waiting to have been worthwhile. I was seventeen. I did not find this romantic then, and I have found it considerably less romantic in every subsequent decade.

The part nobody mentions is that Kevin Rowland eventually admitted I wasn’t even real. A composite, he said. Made to illustrate something about Catholic repression. So let me be clear about what happened: a man invented a girl, spent an entire song pressuring her to take her dress off in front of the nation, put her name in the title so the joke would follow her everywhere, and then revealed she never existed. Which means every woman named Eileen has been living inside someone else’s fantasy since 1982, and none of us were asked.

He said we were far too young and clever. He was half right.

“Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” Looking Glass, 1972

Brandy Responds

He told me I’d make a fine wife, said it right to my face, and then got on a boat, and I kept his name on a locket around my neck for ten years like an idiot while he was out there being romantic and free and married to the sea, which is not a thing you can be married to, which is not a real marriage, which means he was just a man who didn’t want to commit to anything with a pulse and had the nerve to make that sound poetic, and I closed the bar every night and walked home alone through a silent town wearing his name on a chain, and the song about this situation became a number one hit, and everyone who heard it felt sorry for him.

Fuck that guy. Seriously, fuck him.