Album: Fields
Year: 1982
Driven by Janet Wygal’s bass rumbling around her brother Doug’s insistent, tom-filled drum beat, and peppered throughout by backwards guitar, “Walk By Your House” is one of the most sympathetic songs ever written about stalking someone.
Which sounds horrific on paper, I know, and yet, maybe because of the male-female trading off of vocals, and the overall melancholy mood “Walk By Your House” sets, it doesn’t come across that way.
You sleep in your bed
I’m drunk in the fields
I walk by your house
(I walk by your houuuuuuuuuuse)
Part of it is the haunting way Janet Wygal sings the title over and over again throughout the song. It’s just slightly off, in the same way Exene’s greatest vocals are. In fact, that’s one of the things that first attracted me to “Walk By Your House” — it sounded like a psychedelic X song.
But even X wouldn’t have come up with the guitar duel that dominates the middle of the song: practically inventing what Pavement would later perfect, Glenn Morrow & John Light Klages trade riffs back and forth without ever quite slipping into actual guitar solos, and with the backwards guitar weaving its way through, it conjures up those times when you just can’t help yourself but walk by the house of your crush object, because they just might be there.
I know it’s not right
But I’m drawn here night after night
(I walk by your houuuuuuuuse)
I walk by your houseAnd in my darkest of dreams
Baby, I’m dreaming of you
(I walk by your houuuuuuuuuse)
I walk by your house
And in the end, Morrow is reduced to asking the obvious question:
Do you ever walk by my house?
Do ya do ya walk by my houuuuuuuuse?
And even with Wygal finally joining and harmonizing on “houuuuuuuuse,” the final guitar chords make it obvious that the answer is probably “no.”
“Walk by Your House”
“Walk by Your House” Performed live in 1980
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Maybe because there
Stalking. Backwards guitar. Vocals trade off. Guitar duel that invents indie rock.