A song might go on for eight minutes or ten or twelve, padded by interminable guitar jams and organ solos, and the result can be tedium. Or the result can be giddy ecstasy—much depends on the song’s ability to persuade us to follow where it goes, to abandon ourselves to its own sense of abandon. When a tune is noticeably short—which, in the context of most popular music, I would define as around two minutes, maybe even less—it might seem a mere trifle, worth no more than the time allotted to it. Or it might burst with pleasures and seem to be over too soon.

That feeling that a song has come to a premature end can be one of its chief glories. Keats reminds us that an unavoidable part of the experience of pleasure is a recognition that the feeling will not last: Joy’s “hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu.” When I first hear a song, and like it, and it ends before I expect it to, I think, “Already? I want more.” The next time I hear the song, its pleasures become even more darkly rich because they are accompanied by my knowledge of their imminent end. There are songs so short and lovely that I ache when hearing even their first few bars because already I am sorry that they will end so soon.

Buddy Holly, “Everyday,” 1957

There’s something homespun and unstudied about the whole affair. A celesta—a compact keyboard that sounds like a glockenspiel—chimes brightly, riding the spirited rhythm established by stand-up bass and by Jerry Allison, who is usually behind the drum kit but who on this song merely slaps his knee. The presentation feels ingenuous, close to naive, as if Holly is a happy amateur who, suddenly in love, flush with hopeful expectation and the urge to sing about it, must rely on whatever few things are at hand to help him express his unabashed elation.

When the track was recorded in July 1957, Holly was only twenty, young enough, no doubt, still to recall the giddy thrill of adolescent desire, which may be why the lack of self-consciousness in “Everyday,” its expression of guileless trust, does not seem put on. (The 1978 film The Buddy Holly Story is a patchwork of inaccuracies, but some of them are in service of getting the spirit of the music right. In an invented scene in which Buddy and his teenage bandmates are in the Holly family garage practicing “Everyday,” Buddy asks one of them, the next time he’s in the school’s band room, to borrow a glockenspiel so they can put it on the recording. We are reminded of just how young and sheltered these musicians are: they live in their parents’ homes; they go to school.) 

The song might be light on emotional tension—it is all buoyant optimism—but it is not vapid or sentimental. Holly’s singing ensures this. Cultural theorist Paul Willis gets it right when he observes that “Holly’s distinctive style lay mainly in the restless, exclamatory, alert quality of his voice. There was no mournful submission to fate but an active confrontation with life and an awareness of the possibility of change . . . .” Yes: restless, exclamatory, alert. Holly first enters the song by announcing, “Every day, it’s a-gettin’ closer,” that added syllable “a” giving the line a playful kick. Then, appropriate for a tune that captures a youthful, wild excitement and anticipation, he compares the love speeding his way not to a plane or train but to a roller coaster. “Love like yours will surely come my way,” he sings, that “surely” emphasizing his unshakable confidence. A more conventional singer might extend that line’s last vowel, in “way,” over the final beats of the measure, but Holly—in his familiar hiccuping style—instead breaks the vowel into several syllables: “a-hey, a-hey-hey.” His voice for a moment frolics amid the rhythm section, driving the song forward with ebullient energy.

After the bridge and third verse, the celesta takes over for a solo. The celesta player (either Holly’s producer, Norman Petty, or Petty’s wife, Vi—sources disagree about this), in keeping with the song’s simple, childlike approach to its subject, plays only the main melody line, straight; there is no jazzy variation or syncopation, nothing remotely virtuosic. We might be listening to a talented toddler mastering the xylophone. The emotional and psychological world of this record is one of stability and domesticity, as if the singer is safe in a little room in which he can imagine anything and, with a kid-like, joyful noise, celebrate it. He asks the object of his adoration a question—“Do you ever long for / True love from me?”—but, before the question is even uttered, let alone answered, the song has already become a response to it, unfolding freely in the space of possibility, allowing no room for anything but bliss.

After the celesta solo, Holly merely repeats the bridge and first verse. Being unmitigatedly happy, the song has no need to complicate itself lyrically or to shift emotional ground; it stays in one place, a condition of innocent, gleeful expectation. Barely two minutes after the song has begun, it is done. Any longer and it might not be able to sustain its bubbly hopefulness; any longer and our trust in its joy might be shaken; any longer and I might not want to hear it again, immediately, which I usually do.