It's Nice to Have a Friend
Mash-ups & Live Pairings
- It's Nice to Have a Friend / dorothea (Eras Tour, Edinburgh)
“Sidewalk chalk covered in snow”
Sidewalk chalk that looks like snow as the childhood register translated into adult tenderness. The line stages the speaker being walked home by the friend; the chalk marks on the pavement become the song's image of small kindnesses still legible after the walk has ended.
“Call my bluff, call you Babe”
The bridge folds the bluff into the vocabulary of trust rather than contest, 'Call my bluff, call you Babe'. The same poker verb that elsewhere marks deception is softened into the ease of a friendship turned to love, the calling-out an act of closeness rather than exposure.
“Light pink sky, up on the roof”
A light pink sky hangs over two friends on a rooftop with no curfew. The pale colour suits a love that has not yet named itself, gentle and unhurried.
“Light pink sky up on the roof, sun sinks down, no curfew”
The rooftop holds the tender, low-key intimacy of the song, a raised open-air spot at dusk with no rules and nowhere else to be.
“Feels like home, stay in bed the whole weekend”
The bed as the figure of cohabitation made easy, staying in bed the whole weekend stands in for the kind of relationship the song is describing, where doing nothing together is the relationship itself. The bed marks the relationship's unhurried domestic register, and the figure measures the depth of the friendship by the fact that nowhere outside the bed needs to be reached.
bells marking a friendship found, then lost
“Church bells ring, carry me home”
“So (So) long (Long), London (London)” — So Long, London
Community readers hear the bells that open So Long, London inverting the bells of It's Nice to Have a Friend. There, the church bells ring tenderly over the beginning of a friendship that grows into love; here, the same peal tolls over its ending. The bell that once carried the speaker home becomes the sound of leaving the city and the person for good.