Although Sex and the City of course already has a well-known and iconic theme song (composed by Douglas J. Cuomo and Tom Findlay), perhaps had it been made in the present, RAYE’s “Click Clack Symphony” would be considered. After all, so much of the lyrics reek of the way Carrie Bradshaw and co. feel about each other. And there are many verses in the song that remind one of different episodes wherein “the girls” were there for one another. Often in the most important way possible: by going out. Better still, by going out when one of them in particular felt depressed about something (yes, that usually meant a guy—because no one ever said that SATC was about trying to pass the Bechdel test).
However, chief among the numerous storylines this song might apply to is season four’s inaugural episode, “The Agony and the ‘Ex’-tacy.” Commencing with shots of the four women separately getting ready/primping in the mirror, the automatic assumption might be that they’re preparing to go out on a date. However, as Carrie’s voiceover soon makes clear, they’re all just getting ready to meet up with each other. Hence Carrie’s advice, “If you are single, there is one thing you should always take with you when you go out on a Saturday night: your friends.” Now better known, thanks to RAYE, as the “click clack symphony.” And yes, the opening portion to the episode offers up Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda clacking “dem heels” on the cobblestones (a dead giveaway that they ain’t on the Upper East Side no more) as they head toward the venue for an engagement party (which, when the camera does a close-up on the invitation, shows that it’s supposed to take place on Friday, not Saturday—so that voiceover was a fuck-up…or the invitation was. But either way, there’s an inconsistency).
While, in contrast to the nature of the song, no one has been disappointed yet as a “reason” for needing to go out and thumb their noses in the face of sadness, the overall vibe of the quartet strutting down the street together goes hand in hand with the lines, “And this feeling fiends for some feminine healing, by that I mean/I called my girls and said, ‘SOS, pick a dress, pick a time and an address for we are going out tonight!” In another part of the chorus, RAYE urges, “Send the call out, send the call out/Calling all my baddest womens, it’s about to go down/Click-click-click clack symphony, I need that.” As Carrie soon will by the time the episode comes to a close. Even so, after the hell she endured with Big in season three, it’s no secret that a night on the town is well in order even before her next depression hits. For it’s all part of her post-affair-with-a-married-man healing process.
While the heels clack on the way to the party, it is RAYE’s lyric, “And this sound reminds me that it’s going to be alright,” that would actually suit Carrie’s voiceover. Even though, while at the party, both Charlotte and Miranda feel quite the opposite, with the former fretting over the status of her relationship with Trey (the two decided to separate [but not divorce] at the end of season three) and the latter feeling that she has to perform a one-woman comedy act to deflect all the “other halves” in the room from pitying her singledom.
Ultimately, however, this is very much a Carrie episode (yes, it usually is—but particularly so in this case). For it’s going to be her thirty-fifth birthday. Something Samantha suggests they ought to celebrate at Il Cantinori. Carrie claims, “I’m not sure I wanna do anything. I’m kind of into laying low.” Samantha counters, “Laying low or feeling low?” Needless to say, it doesn’t take long for Carrie to be talked into une petite fête. Though it also doesn’t take long, once she’s at the restaurant, to regret ever agreeing to this. After all, it’s fairly humiliating to be sitting at a large table filled with empty seats while the entire waitstaff keeps looking at you expectantly. And then, more stinging still for the woman next to you celebrating her birthday in company to blow out the candles and scream, “Twenty-five! Fuck, I’m old!”
As if all of that weren’t bad enough, the restaurant host then comes up to Carrie and tells her that the woman who has just arrived to deliver the cake is waiting to be paid. Thus, Carrie’s next voiceover, “After I paid seventy dollars for my own birthday cake, I was totally out of the party mood. So I decided to go home, and kill myself.” It’s at this point that she’s reaching the state that RAYE brings up at the beginning of the song: “Did you know the odds to be born on this Earth’s 1 in 400 trillion?/I conquered those odds yet I can’t conquer leaving the house.” Or at least, that’s the vibe Carrie is radiating when she adds to her voiceover, “By the time I got home, I had fallen into an emotional hole so deep, only a fireman without a collarbone could rescue me.”
In this episode, that “fireman” is Charlotte, who apparently has a key to just waltz right in while Carrie is trying to take a cleansing (in more ways than one) shower, only to be scared to death when she realizes there’s someone right outside her shower curtain. Once she processes that it’s Charlotte, Carrie pulls back the curtain to reveal that her face is now smeared with mascara. And in this moment, it would be an only appropriate time to hear RAYE’s lyric, “And you never could’ve guessed I started my morning in tears/Got a great waterproof mascara I can recommend,” soundtrack it with a sardonic tinge. As Charlotte tries to coax her to come out again, Carrie says, “I am not in the mood to be with a bunch of people.” Not after sitting at that table for so long, feeling the weight of RAYE’s words, “I feel alone, I feel like no one really needs me.”
But Charlotte manages to convince her otherwise and get her out to the coffee shop, proving the validity of RAYE’s words, “I can see the glimmer of the girl who once believed/She just needs/She needs a pep talk.” Which would, in turn, prompt Carrie to say, “So thank you, Carly [or Charlotte], for having a sixth sense and for calling to remind me/We don’t settle for depression on a Friday night.” Instead, Carrie settles for changing into yet another outfit because, honestly, “Jim-Jimmy Choo, it’s time to open up the closet/It’s a sad sight to see Manolo Blahnik gather cobwebs” (these being the lyrics of “Click Clack Symphony” that make it the most “cosmically linked” to Sex and the City).
By the end of her next “pep talk” with all three of her closest friends, Carrie’s loneliness and sadness from that harrowing restaurant ordeal is further soothed when Charlotte sweetly tells all of them, “Don’t laugh at me, but…maybe we could be each other’s soul mates.” In short, Charlotte is saying that Carrie doesn’t have to feel alone or “incomplete” because she’s single (the core message of this episode, and one that is generally present throughout many others in the SATC oeuvre).
So it is that Carrie might then have the next RAYE-backed revelation: “She must hold on, and she must let go [which is exactly the kind of simultaneous and antithetical action that Carrie engages in with Big at the end of the episode]/She’ll be alright/No riding, shining, armored knight/She will save herself this time.” Here, of course, RAYE is channeling pure Carrie energy, who also famously said in the first episode of season three (titled “Where There’s Smoke…”), “Charlotte, honey, did you ever think that maybe we’re the white knights, and we’re the ones that have to save ourselves?” Though, in “Click Clack Symphony” and Sex and the City, what both RAYE and Carrie are really saying is that you have to save yourself with the help of some “feminine healing” in the form of “calling all my baddest womens” for reinforcement. Especially when one is finding it as difficult as Carrie to leave the house after being stood up at Il Cantinori.
