Islands in the stream (1983)
The opening couplet of this classic duet places a familiar idiom ever so slightly out of context, like a foreign coin among a handful of pounds and pence.
Baby, when I met you there was peace unknown,
I set out to get you with a fine-tooth comb
There’s a humour in those lines — and the fine-tooth comb reference in particular — that tells us something about the people singing. This isn’t a pair of nervous first-timers sat silently in McDonald’s staring blankly into the void of their McFlurries.
The singers have had time to become comfortable enough to take themselves less than seriously. They’re trading off each other like characters from a Nora Ephron movie. This is When Kenny Met Dolly.
That same sense of humour is reflected in the music. The arrangement bounces along with an easy swagger that’s rounded periodically by a pair of major chords hammered out by the whole band.
But just as there’s a sense of hard-won experience behind the nonchalance of the lyrics, the music has a complexity that reveals the seriousness of the writing.
The crucial moment comes just after the first chorus, when Rodgers stops singing and Dolly comes into her own.
As Parton takes centre stage, she’s welcomed with a killer key change that really allows her to take command of the song.
She follows that entrance a few lines later with the song’s deepest lyric, which takes us beneath the confident facade of the singers and points at a hidden depth.
While the chorus is a mixed bag of garbled metaphors (can islands sail away?) the lyrical peak is reached in these lines:
And the message is clear –
This could be the year for the real thing
She may have been around the block once or twice — she’s probably been hurt a fair few times as well — but the hope that someone will come along to save her has never gone.
