The One by the Backstreet Boys

I don’t quite recall if it was your mom or Megan’s mom, but when it was someone’s mom’s turn to drive us to and from school we would usually listen to one of the Backstreet Boys CDs, the one that had “Backstreet’s Back” on it or the one that had just come out, Millennium; and usually it was the latter. My favorite track on that album was definitely “Larger than Life,” that being the hardest rocker; I thought “I Want It That Way” was boring; and my second favorite was “The One,” which was relatively deep in the playlist and which I liked for its heroic, almost martial sound:

I guess you were lost
When I met you,
Still there were tears in your eyes,
So out of trust,
And I knew
No more than mysteries and lies.

There you are,
Wild and free,
Reaching out like you needed me:
The helping hand to make it right.
I am holding you all through the night.

I chose the punctuation in the second stanza, which I guess you could call the pre-chorus, deliberately, with the aim of not prejudicing the reading of the lines “Reaching out like you needed me: The helping hand to make it right.” You should really go back and listen to the song again to see my point, but there’s a marked ambiguity in the words as they’re spoken: I always thought it was the speaker who was the helping hand to whom the addressee was reaching out (then it could be “Reaching out like you needed me, the helping hand to make it right), but it could just as easily be the addressee reaching out the helping hand to the speaker (“Reaching out, like you needed me, the helping hand to make it right”). Maybe the second reading is a little against the grain thematically, but there clues are there: “Reaching out like you needed me,” “like” denoting the appearance of need, and possibly doubting the reality; “the helping hand to make it right,” the “helping hand” serving as the object of “reaching out” rather than the speaker’s figurative self-identification; “I knew no more than mysteries and lies,” suggesting mild distress on the speaker’s part, so that the speaker himself is in need of help.

Of course, it’s supposed to be read both ways: later on the bridge has the line “You need me and I need you,” so we can take the whole song as a message about interdependence. The addressee is in trouble, the speaker wants to help her but can’t because she won’t open up to him, but she, in a way, comes to his rescue by reaching out and forging a connection, and he in turn comes to her rescue by returning the helping hand. It’s a pretty mature message for a song from a boy band, and you have to hand it to the boys in Sweden for packing such a deceptively subtle yet thematic ambiguity into lyrics whose simplicity wouldn’t seem to bear much scrutiny.