"This Heart is Occupied"

A shining moment from power-pop stalwarts in middle age

It’s commonplace to regard human minds as being occupied in the act of concentration. The lead song on the ninth album from the Boston-based power-pop quartet known as Guster gives us a heart that’s occupied, rather than a mind. It’s a clever twist—nothing out of the ordinary, maybe, for Guster’s singer and lyricist, Ryan Miller (who used to write a newspaper column about Vermont dive bars), but the song’s been tickling my ears and brain all summer. To be sure, the music’s dulcet demeanor and sophisticated melody do much of that tickling. But it’s satisfying to me that the song’s conceit aligns with my own philosophy of love, as a state best represented in actions, not emotions. Every time I hear “This Heart is Occupied” I noodle on the ways an occupied heart is both like and not like an occupied mind.

As I think of it, saying that my heart is occupied means not merely that someone is there, present, as if occupying a chair, the way a book might occupy my immediate attention. The occupation of my heart means I’m occupied with my beloved, actively thinking about her, considering how we relate, projecting our identities (hers, mine, ours) into an unknown future, living in ways that fit that future, respecting who she is. This sense of occupied stretches the more common notion of an occupied mind: If my time and energies are taken up this way, they’re correspondingly not occupied, either the same way or to the same degree, for someone else or with other matters. The shift, from mind to heart, is one of scope and duration.

There’s a bit of story in the song. Taking its cues, I find would-be lovers who paired early with other partners but never extinguished their flames for each other. The feeling between them seems to be that now might be the time to act on their yearning.

We are not young but still need fun

Twice in a lifetime

Miller’s building a case. Is the experience of two loves in a lifetime really so many? Several lines speak to inappropriate timing or life situation: “Your cup is full / And your heart is occupied”; “Your plate it full,” etc.

But even though they’ve loved from afar for such a “long, long time,” what the song proposes is not breaking from their partners for a fresh life together, despite the mention of “a course of correction.” Rather, their glimpsed possibility is merely “a moment to shine.” It isn’t (as Prince teases in “Let’s Pretend We’re Married”) “if you’re not busy for the next seven years….” It’s “stay the night,” “that’s why you came here tonight.” The lovers, then, are occupied in two senses: taken, or spoken for, in their separate relationships, and also taken—preoccupied, we might say—with each other: brimming with passion that can find release only in the “clarity” of their fleeting time, their “perfect sheet of white.”

I hear in this song a parallel to David Bowie’s 1977 single “‘Heroes,’” whose title word is forever trapped in quotation marks that question the nobility of the song’s trysting partners. Guster’s song plays differently for its 50-something lovers than “‘Heroes’” does for the brazen but still tragic 20-somethings of Bowie’s early adulthood. That difference is borne on Guster’s music. It’s beautifully and inescapably courageous, bitter, and yes, sweet.