When I look up from my pillow
I dream you are there with me
Though you are far away
I know you'll always be near to me
And there we are in the beginning of a Ray Davies masterpiece sent out to the world. The Kinks never recorded it, but Cher, Peggy Lee, his paramour and baby mama Chrissie Hynde, Sia, and many others took a stab at it. Hynde and Sia own it when they sing it. But the Ray Davies demo, clocking in at 2:45 is something else. It is 1965, The Kinks are already taking off, with a sides known to many and b sides cherished by the faithful. Leonard Bernstein is going on television explaining to young people that “You Really Got Me” is a sublime use of the Mixolydian mode. Then he conducts the New York Philharmonic playing it. It is good to be Kinks and will be good for a long time. It beats the factory. You can listen to Ray Davies at the salt mines here.
When we go to sleep, we try to soothe ourselves. We go fetal. We have to delude ourselves that we are in a womb, that we will be safe. Ray Davies never tells us what life was like awake. We know nothing about the person he misses—there are no gender pronouns in the song, and most of the covers have been by women—and we know nothing about whether getting to sleep is an ordeal. He gets to sleep, and it is in that in between state that thinks that his lost lover is still there. “My mirrored twin, my next of kin, I’d know you in my sleep.” Leonard Cohen would write that much later. Davies seems to be caressing the piano while the chords amateurishly emerge. The double tracked vocal is catharsis itself. It as if the entire waking day is just a slog so he can get back to the lover he misses. This is Ray Davies in 1965, and we don’t know if this song is confessional or something made to order, but it doesn’t matter. The song takes on a life of its own.