Savannah Jeffreys – "Key in Lock" (2014)

My hand fits in yours

Like key and lock

The Pont des Arts, a bridge that connects the Left Bank and Right Bank of the river Seine in Paris, became notorious over the past few years because hundreds of thousands of couples attached "love locks" to its grillwork.  

Adam Gopnik explained the "love locks" phenomenon in the New Yorker last year:

Lovers buy cheap padlocks from lock sellers, scribble their initials on the lock, shackle the lock to the bridge’s railings, and then throw the key into the river.  At first, there were a few, then there were a lot, and now they are everywhere, about three-quarters of a million in all, locks shackled to locks shackled to locks shackled to locks, every square inch of the bridge crowded with black initials, brass bodies.  Earlier this year, some of the grillwork of the Pont des Arts collapsed under the weight of all that love.

The city government has been slow to act, partly for the usual exasperating French bureaucratic reasons and partly out of a genuine bewilderment over how to constrain the passionate gestures of tourists on whose illusions of Paris as the best place to declare one’s love the city’s economy ever more depends.

City workers recently began the arduous task of removing the locks, which weigh an estimated 45 tons.  But the city has no plans to recover the three-quarters of a million keys that lie at the bottom of the Seine.  

The phenomenon has spread to many other cities – including New York City (the Brooklyn Bridge), Rome, Florence, Dublin, Melbourne, and Seoul.

I recently noted a handful of love locks on a fence on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, DC, just downstream of the Francis Scott Key Bridge:

It is customary for the lovers to put their initials on love locks before affixing them to a bridge or other structure.  But some of the love locks I saw would be more accurately described as "hate locks":

"Key and Lock" was written and recorded by Savannah Jeffreys, a Wesleyan University student who just happens to be the daughter of singer-songwriter Garland Jeffreys.  

The song is one of a dozen-odd songs by young, undiscovered female singers that are featured on the soundtrack of the 2014 movie, Ask Me Anything.  

Here's "Key and Lock":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: