Mastodawn

The La’s Play “There She Goes”

Listen to this track by jangly Liverpudlian Britpop outliers The La’s. It’s “There She Goes”, a single first released in 1988, and re-released the following year. The 1989 entry peaked at a very modest number 59 on the UK singles chart. Perhaps it didn’t fit in with Madchester, House, and the dance pop singles that ruled the airwaves by the end of the 1980s. The band re-released the song yet again after their self-titled Steve Lilywhite-produced debut came out in 1990. At that point, the song scored inside the top twenty which represented its highest position in the UK charts.

Written by La’s frontman and guitarist Lee Mavers, “There She Goes” bridged the late Eighties to what would come in the Nineties. But it had legs enough to run the distance even beyond that era, firmly establishing itself into the fabric of pop culture. List-making music publications, pop fans of every stripe, and fellow musicians alike have all praised it, and for good reason. There’s just something about this tune that sounds as though it came from some magical realm, seeming to belong to no single pop era. It suggests the influence of Sixties pop. But it never sounds like a pastiche or an attempt to be anything other than what it is. It captures the imagination and doesn’t seem to let go, even as the decades roll on.

As a composition, “There She Goes” is rooted in simplicity. But it also undercuts expectations at the same time. For instance, it defies verse-chorus-verse conventions. Instead, it’s all chorus, with only a slight tonal change thanks to minor chords played over the melody in a four-bar bridge. Even its central riff is simple, resting on just three notes. The chord progressions and the lyrical structure are also basic, but almost absurdly effective. Perhaps its appeal is actually because of how unassuming it is on all these levels. But then again, there’s also something very mysterious about “There She Goes” that make it more than the sum of its parts.

Fellow songwriters from Noel Gallagher to Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard cite it as a personal favourite, even describing it as the perfect pop song. It’s been covered by The Boo Radleys, Babybird, and Sixpence None the Richer. The latter version scored top twenty placements in charts all over the world by the end of the Nineties. It’s been included on several movie and television soundtracks, often helping to underscore breathless and wistfully joyful emotional beats within the drama, or to set the scene for the same. For these purposes, whether in a film, a TV show, or as the soundtrack to one’s life, “There She Goes” is hard to beat in the sweet melancholia stakes.

For a song comprised of such basic elements, its recording history is complicated. Delivering this song and the rest of their sole album proved to be a difficult birth for The La’s. Over a two-year span, false starts in the studio, changing band line-ups, and multiple producers coming and going stalled its release. For his part, writer Lee Mavers struggled with an old demon that plagues many a songwriter and musician in the studio. In translating it from his musical brain into a fully realized recording, this song and the rest of the record never quite sounded right on tape to him to match what he was hearing in his head. This common struggle was more profound for him than it is for most and the critical accolades that followed didn’t seem to change his mind.

The La’s frontman, guitarist, and songwriter Lee Mavers, pictured here performing with the band in June 1991 at Club Quattro, Tokyo, Japan. Image: Masao Nakagami (cropped).

Eventually, his perfectionism put a wall between himself and his bandmates. This was one of the forces that put the brakes on the band just when they needed to keep their momentum going. So, even to its writer, and among other songs on the album, “There She Goes” proved to be elusive. You just can’t pin it down. This hasn’t stopped listeners and critics from trying to do that anyway, of course.

A big question over the years has been this: what is “There She Goes” about, anyway? A persistent narrative for many years was that it isn’t the love song it seems to be on the surface. According to pop myth, It’s actually an ode to heroin. The lyrical references to “racing through my brain ” as coupled with “pulsing through my vein” were the prime suspects in support of this theory:

There she goes
There she goes again
Racing through my brain
And I just can’t contain
This feelin’ that remains

There she blows
There she blows again
Pulsing through my vein
And I just can’t contain
This feelin’ that remains

~ “There She Goes” by The La’s

Members of The La’s have reacted to the supposed drug references in “There She Goes” in various ways, from outright denial to expressions of apathy. Lee Mavers himself denied that this song is about drugs or drug-taking, making this interpretation more urban legend than fact. Yet some myths are hard to kill once they’ve taken root. This made some listeners feel as though they’d been tricked into mistaking a drug song for a love song. This wouldn’t be the only example of this kind of thing and the cynicism alone is enough to conclude that the whole drugs narrative is reductive at best.

Instead, maybe it’s useful to consider that another song on the album, “Timeless Melody“, is about how the act of songwriting and being a creative person feels to Lee Mavers. It’s not a stretch then to conclude that the She in “There She Goes” is more likely to be the muse Herself. Even still, maybe it really is about a girl Mavers admired. Who can say? Whatever it is, and as time has marched on, the scope of this song has become wider than any one interpretation anyway.

That’s another one of the great things that make it such a pop standard. There’s room in here for everyone to associate it with any feeling or state of mind that lifts our spirits, gives us a sense of transcendence, and lends us an existential jolt when we suddenly find ourselves in a moment of clarity. It’s one of those pop songs that welcomes you in, no matter where you are. It’s an expression of what’s common to the human experience as we experience the profundity of single moments in our lives. As a theme for any song, there’s nothing more enduring and universal than that.

As for The La’s, they burned very brightly but not for very long. They broke up by 1991. Bassist John Power formed the band Cast the following year and scored some solid hits of his own throughout the Nineties. He remains active with the band today. Both he and Mavers participated in reformed La’s line-ups for shows by the 2000s and 2010s. At the time of this writing, Mavers has yet to release new music. Perhaps he’s still enthralled by what he’s hearing in his head so much that laying it down on tape wouldn’t do it justice. Even if that’s true, and even if this had been the only song he ever put out into the world, “There She Goes” remains rightly treasured as the timeless pop gem it is.

For more on The La’s and “There She Goes”, here’s an article on udiscovermusic.com with contributions from former La’s guitarist Paul Hemmings.

And for further rushes of nostalgia, here’s Sixpence None the Richer’s version of “There She Goes” to bring it on home.

Enjoy!

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