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Nervously

Writers - Tennant/Lowe
First released - 1990
Original album - Behaviour
Producer - Harold Faltermeyer, Pet Shop Boys
Subsequent albums - (none)
Other releases - (none)

Neil has noted that he and Chris were writing songs for Behaviour at around the same time that he (Neil) was experiencing his first "serious" love affair. Many of the album's songs reflect this fact, though perhaps none so clearly as "Nervously." On the other hand, it wasn't actually written at the same time as the other tracks on the album. Rather, Neil wrote it—or at least a preliminary version of it—in 1981, even before there was a "Pet Shop Boys." But it may have been Neil's recent romantic experience that inspired him to pull it from the vaults, so to speak, and to perfect it with Chris, who specifically came up with the chord sequence that brings the chorus to a close.

There's no mystery as to what this song is about. It simply describes in a very gentle, touching manner the nervous anxiety, uncertainty, and anticipation ("sexual trepidation," as Neil once put it) experienced by anyone meeting someone they find attractive and subsequently falling in love. The musical backdrop is particularly effective, with a mildly "jittery" feel that mirrors the narrator's own "jitters," gradually building in intensity as the lyrics simultaneously describe the growing intensity of the narrator's feelings. An underrated yet masterful performance.

Annotations

The lyrics of "Nervously" employ a high degree of enjambment, in which versified sentences continue without pause or break from one line or melodic phrase to the next, as in—

Your flashing eyes and sudden smiles
are never quite at ease and neither am I

While enjambment itself isn't uncommon in song lyrics—here it's just used more often and blatantly than usual—this song also employs one instance of a quite unusual variation on enjambment: an elided form of the relatively rare literary device known as anadiplosis. In typical anadiplosis, the last word of one line or phrase is repeated as the first word of the next line or phrase. But occasionally in songs, the anadiplosis is "elided" in such a way that the word in question isn't repeated at all; rather, the word is sung just once so that the last word of one line actually becomes the first word of the next line. The lines in "Nervously" that utilize this device are:

But nervously we never get it
right from the start I approved of you

The word "right" both concludes the clause "we never get it right" and begins the subsequent phrase "right from the start." Yet "right" isn't repeated. Its one occurrence serves double-duty in two separate and distinct grammatical structures. In this way the elided anadiplosis essentially creates a "pseudo-enjambment" where none would otherwise exist. A few other enjambed lines in the song flirt with elided anadiplosis, but none offer such a textbook example of it as that.
One of the more interesting instrumental aspects of this song occurs toward its conclusion, when a quiet zimbelstern-like backdrop enters the mix at around 3:15 (it's hard to say precisely where because it's so quiet at first) and continues playing as other sounds drop out, eventually becoming the only instrument left. It then continues into the beginning of the next track, "The End of the World," where it soon fades away during that song's introduction. The zimbelstern (meaning "cymbal-star" in German), which dates back at least to the 1500s, is a musical instrument—often a "stop" on pipe organs—that rings tiny, differently pitched, "unkeyed" bells at random. Because the bells aren't in any single key and are played at random, it can provide a backdrop in any key, adding "color" to the arrangement. "Nervously" doesn't employ an actual zimbelstern but instead seemingly random synthesizer "tinkling" that serves a similar musical function and bridges the two album tracks.
It's a minor point but fascinating nonetheless that the Japanese edition of Behaviour gives "Nervously" a subtitle that translates as "Boyhood Days." Along the same lines, it also gives Behaviour overall a subtitle of its own: "Melody of Roses," no doubt stemming (pun intended) from the presence of roses on its cover.

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