The Most Sensitive Song of the 70's
Ivy Griffin
Over the course of his tragically short career, singer-songwriter Jim Croce became famous for his world-weary love songs and comic ballads of bullies getting their comeuppance. In his public persona, Croce embodied a very particular masculine archetype in American music and pop culture: a working-class guy with high emotional intelligence, rough-hewn but romantic and with an almost religious dedication to poetic justice.
Most of his classic catalogue of songs is sing from this point of view. But one song in particular captures this spirit sublimely: “Operator”, released in the summer of 1972.
Subtitled “(That’s Not the Way it Feels)”, it is an emotion-forward acoustic ballad. Lyrically, it’s one side of a conversation between a guy and a telephone operator (one of several charmingly retro set-pieces in the narrative). The man is trying to track down the phone number of his ex, who apparently left him for his best friend Ray and moved to L.A.
Love songs, especially those of the unrequited variety, are the stock and trade of Top 40 hit artists. Yet what makes “Operator” so resonant to this day, and therapeutically relevant, is its emotional complexity, its ambivalence. He says he wants to call his ex and her new lover “to tell ‘em I’m fine and to show I’ve overcome the blow”. But mere seconds later, he says:
I only wish my words
Could just convince myself
That it just wasn’t real,
But that’s not the way it feels
Unlike most pop songs about love and betrayal, with boilerplate depictions of sadness and righteously angry declarations of bouncing back, Croce’s song reveals the heart and mind in all its messiness and confusion.
Over the course of a few verses and choruses the speaker acknowledges, to the operator and to himself, that what he wants to think just doesn’t match how he actually feels. He’s wounded. Despite pretentions of toughness—at one point he asks the operator to repeat the number because “there’s something in my eye”, barely concealing that he can’t read his handwriting because of the flow of tears—he knows he has no choice but to sit in his vulnerability.
“Operator” reminds me of therapy when ‘the work’ is truly being done. Sometimes we need the kind-of-neutral, kind-of-compassionate presence on the other end to act as a facilitator, to give us time and space to work through grief. Past denial and depression, and, reluctantly, toward acceptance.
So if you find that your thoughts and feelings don’t rhyme, that the enormity of your loss is not only overwhelming but confusing, trusted members of your support system are here for you. And as long as you’re with Jim Croce, you’re in good company.
Warmly,
he/him
Supervised by Danielle Kardum, LMFT #114847