What is it about a cute song describing a girl wanting to dance with a guy for a night that goes so well with a jailbreak scene featuring a blue man with a magic arrow killing everyone and a raccoon with guns shooting up the rest?
aha you see I examined this song when I was writing some Meredith meta and I think the answer is:
the girl in the song also wants to break free!
The narrator of the song sees this girl in a cafe and they begin mutually flirting. (”She was just sittin’ there giving me looks that made my mouth water”). But the narrator also knows that the girl “belonged to bad man Jose” and well… the use of the word belonged to in the context of a romantic relationship is rarely gonna be a good one. So this girl dances with/kisses the narrator, and tells him twice “I’m all alone, and the night is so long.” Her relationship with Jose the Bad Man isn’t a fulfilling one, clearly.
“Then the music stopped/When I looked the cafe was empty/Then I heard Jose say/Man, you know you’re in trouble plenty” Jose turns up and is pissed at the narrator for taking “his” girl. He’s also sufficiently scary enough, it seems, to clear out the whole cafe when he’s looking for a fight. The narrator flees, but
as he does he hears the girl repeating the “Come a little bit closer/I’m all alone and the night is so long” verse to Jose. Which could read as her trying to convince him to not go after the narrator and beat him up/kill him.
So it’s sort of a song about someone (the girl) romantically cheating, I guess. But if Jose really is as bad as he comes across, she’s probably not at all happy in her relationship (if he’s violent to other men, is he also violent to her?) and is looking for an out in the form of another man, which she doesn’t get.
And the song sort of forms a thematic link between Yondu, Ego and Meredith! Meredith, of course, is the one who put the song on the Awesome Mix, so it must have been one of her favourite songs. And yet like so many of the songs on the Awesome Mix, it’s a song about a woman who is in some way in the claws of a dangerous, unfaithful, or otherwise objectionable man.
Just like Meredith herself…
All that, and “I’m all alone and the night is so long” perfectly sums up Yondu’s state of mind at that point. His friends are dead, his crew has mutinied, his son is in danger and if he goes to fight Ego he’ll probably die. Luckily, unlike the girl in the song, he may not be quite as alone as he thinks.
DAMN it’s a well chosen song. The whole of the Awesome Mix Vol 2 is just friggin’ amazing.