Hold on to Your Friends

It was very late, around 11PM last night when I began listening to Vauxhall and I by Morrissey. I spent the night actually watching Who Put The M in Manchester before deciding to play this album. So it was safe to say that I’m having a Morrissey night. Oh, and I also listened to some of the The Smiths track before playing Vauxhall and I and I imagined the band playing in my mind. It wasn’t hard to think about Morrissey singing because his voice when performing live is so similar / the same to all the records which is wickedly amazing. Given the fact that I live in the age where auto-tune is treated OK to do and it is really weird when you saw an artist performs live and he/she sounds different. And then there are some bands/musician who also sounds different when playing live. Anyway, Morrissey sounds amazing both in record and live.

The song from Vauxhall and I that really hit my heart so hard is Hold on to Your Friends. It’s a sad song, both the melody and the lyrics. So while listening to this song, I decided to check Morrissey’s Autobiography on his story about the Vauxhall and I. Vauxhall and I is Morrissey’s fourth studio album released in March 1994 (I’m 5 years old that year). It’s a very successful album, with the song The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get reached number 46 Billboard Hot 100. The song, Hold on to Your Friends was the next single and according to his book, Morrissey ‘hatched an interesting video made up of segments of the film The Blue Lamp‘. Sadly, Morrissey didn’t received the approval from the owner of the film and so there’s no music video for this song.

Then there’s the retelling of Morrissey driving down and playing this song loudly and then he pulled over and began crying. This paragraph breaks my heart.

This song, Hold on to Your Friends is my favorite from this album. It’s brilliant – both in music and lyrics. I can say that I relate to this song and I agree that we must hold on to our friends, sadly there will be some that will only call you when they feel depressed but when they feel happy you are so, so, so far from their minds.