One of the first Cure songs I heard was not actually sung by The Cure. It was a cover of The Cure's "Lovesong," done by 311, a band hailing from Omaha, Nebraska that created songs meant to live somewhere in the seafoam along the California coast, while a bonfire spits embers into the surf.
As a child, I loved "Lovesong" — it was wistful and soft, an ethereal, hypnotic hymn, and I spent many car rides with my temples pressed against the window of my family's silver Honda minivan, memorizing the lyrics incorrectly. In the original version of the song, in a split-second interlude between the chorus and the third verse, Cure frontman Robert Smith sighs to some unknown other, "Fly me to the moon." At age six, those achingly beautiful words about love and longing imprinted on my soft adolescent mind, floating me to a place of raw emotion before I was even old enough to understand the acute experience of such feelings.
