The Final Countdown

 I coach my youngest son's soccer team, and we had our final game of the season on Monday night.  It was a crazy late game for 8 and 9 year olds, with a start time of 8:30pm.  Usually he is going to bed at that time.

The game was also all the way across town, a little under an hour away.  Games last about an hour, so this meant that we weren't getting home until 10:30pm or so.

I thought my son was going to be super tired on the way home since it was so late, and I told him to try to go to sleep while I drove home.  He was in the back with his eyes closed, and I thought he might be nodding off.  I had the radio playing quietly, tuned to Kool 108 which plays 80s and 90s songs.

"The Final Countdown" came on, and my son started singing along to it with his eyes still closed, or at least the chorus part where they say "It's the final countdown", and then you get the classic synthesizer riff.  When the song was over, he asked me if I could play it again.  I initially told him no for two reasons:  it was on the radio, and I can't replay those songs, and he really should be trying to sleep.  He said he wasn't tired anymore, though, and really wanted to listen to that song again.

After hearing arguments from both angels on either shoulder about what to do in this situation, I said screw it, why not jam to some Final Countdown on the way home?  So, I pulled it up on Spotify and we spent more time than I'd care to admit blasting Final Countdown.  My son pretty much views it as one of the greatest songs ever now, right up there with his other top hits of "Right Now" by Van Halen and "It's Raining Tacos" by I don't even know (he is a man of varied tastes).  We did let Spotify take over for a bit.  "Take on Me" by a-ha was next (covered on this blog before).  "Thunderstruck" from AC/DC came on, and that was a big hit for a bit, but he said that Brian Johnson's voice had gotten a bit scary for him and was going to give him nightmares (I can see that), so we moved on.  Anyway, The Final Countdown was the clear winner.  At one point he asked if we could get him a lyric sheet so he could learn all of the words, and not just the chorus part.

I tend to pay a bit of attention to where his mind is going with certain things, particularly after our discussion about Francis Scott Key.  In this case, I didn't pay as much attention to the song since we were just jamming out, but the next morning (yesterday) I went for a run and kicked it off with The Final Countdown, because why not.  In listening to the song, I remembered my son asking about getting a lyric sheet, and so I payed attention a bit more to what the words were actually saying.

I think we have a pretty good fit here with recent storylines, actually, including the gathering off of this world to somewhere else.  I am not going to go into line by line analysis, but just posting the song here for anyone interested.