Big Mike's

You close your eyes, you take a deep breath, and there she appears. Not just her physical form, with all of its intimate details — its curves, the color of her eyes, the shape of her lips — but her entire being: her anger, her whispers of love, her banter. Everything appears in front of you. It is rare to know someone so deeply, with such profound familiarity, that their physical absence is inconsequential to their being right there in front of you. That is a rare love, an almost indescribable love, where only those who understand it can pick out the details and the beauty in what others might dismiss as mundane or as nuisances. That love is the subject of Dijon’s 2021 song “Big Mike’s,” co-written with Mk.gee — Michael “Mike” Gordon.

Notice what he chooses to praise. Not her at her best, not the version of her that the world is allowed to see, but a long, tumbling list of the moments most love songs are too vain to mention. He likes how she looks when she has “questions,” when she “get[s] stressed,” all “tensed up.” He likes her “when [she’s] mad,” when she gets “mood swings.” He likes how she looks when she’s “not listening,” when she’s angry enough to “ball [her] fists up / At me.” He is not describing being adored. He is describing being argued with — a fist balled at him, in particular — and he files it under things he likes about her. This is the first and most radical move the song makes: it takes everything we are taught to wait out in a relationship, the stress and the moods and the fights, and it refuses to wait them out. It loves them in the present tense. It calls them by name.

And then comes the most beautiful image in the song, the one the whole thing turns on: “Two eyes in your head / Two eyes blue, look like mood rings.” A mood ring is the most quietly devotional object he could have reached for. It is a thing you have to be close enough to read, a thing that only means anything if you have learned, over years, what each color is trying to tell you. To say her eyes are mood rings is to say he can read her weather on her face — that he has watched her long enough to know the difference between the blue of tired and the blue of angry and the blue of about to laugh. That is not the gaze of a new lover memorizing a beautiful stranger. That is the gaze of someone who has been studying the same face so long it has become an instrument he knows how to play.

Then the song does the thing that breaks it open. In the middle of all this looking, all this cataloguing, the register changes and he goes down: “I might drop to my knees, Joanna, please / Will you take me? Will you take me?” He kneels. He does not ask will you be mine. He asks will you take me — and the difference is everything. One is acquisition; the other is surrender. He is not adding her to his life; he is handing her his. The proposal is real, the knees and the name and all, but the grammar of it offers him up to be carried. The bravest thing a person can do in love is not to ask for someone but to ask to be taken, because it means admitting, out loud and on your knees, that you contain flaws that must be accepted to be loved. You have cracks, and in such a vulnerable position — on your knees, arms wide open — you say, “Will you take me as I am?” The question is almost biblical: the posture of confession, the arms spread like the cross, the whole broken self offered up to be received or refused. That is what grace is — to be seen all the way down to the cracks and taken anyway, not in spite of them but cracks and all. To be taken as you are is the only love that ever actually saves anyone.

And here is the part that keeps me up. To love someone this specifically is also to have given them the power to wound you most precisely. He likes the fists balled at him; he knows what her anger looks like aimed his way, and he has decided to stay in range of it anyway. There is no version of this love where he is safe. You cannot study a face that closely, cannot learn to read the mood rings, cannot kneel and ask to be taken, without handing the other person the exact map of where you are softest. That is not a flaw in the song. That is the whole cost of it, said plainly. He knows. And he kneels anyway.

Near the end, under everything, almost thrown away, comes the smallest line in the song and maybe the largest: “Are you awake? And should I come and get you?” After the looking, after the kneeling, after the enormous question of will you take me, the song lands on the most ordinary sentence two people who live a life together ever say. Are you up. Do you want me to come get you. It is the language of car rides and late shifts and someone stranded somewhere, calling the one person who will always answer. And that is the secret the whole song has been walking toward: that this is what the grand devotion is for. Not the kneeling, in the end, but the coming to get you. Not the proposal, but the ten thousand small arrivals after it. The mood rings and the balled fists and the “should I come and get you” are not lesser than the love — they are the love, the daily unglamorous substance of it, which is exactly the thing the world dismisses as mundane and which this song insists, with its whole chest, is the most beautiful thing a person ever gets to have.

And Dijon and Mk.gee let it sound exactly that lived-in. The track is loose, close, a little blown-out at the edges; his voice cracks and reaches and doesn’t apologize for it; you can hear two people who made the thing fast, in a room, chasing a feeling before it could cool. There’s a reason it is called “Big Mike’s” and sits first on the record — it was the first song Dijon and Mike Gordon ever made together, the door the whole album walked through, named for the man on the other side of it. So the title carries the same double meaning the song does: it is a love song to one person, and it is quietly also about the kind of closeness that lets two people make something this unguarded at all. Some love songs sell you the wedding. This one hands you the marriage — the questions, the moods, the fists, the eyes you’ve learned to read like rings, and the voice in the dark asking if you’re awake, should it come and get you. That was the whole tender point of it. The mundane was never the obstacle to the love. The mundane was the love, the whole time.