This song hands you the sweet, restless ache of a crush that has taken over your head. You may feel the giddy pull of it, the way one person can crowd out every other thought and turn your own company into a stakeout for a phone call. It plays infatuation as innocent and total, and for a few minutes you get to feel that flutter secondhand. There is a soft anxiety underneath the sweetness, the not-knowing whether the feeling is returned, the hoping for a sign. Taken in, the song can make longing feel tender rather than pathetic, a familiar and forgivable state. It stays entirely on the surface of the wanting, a warm, young snapshot of being pleasantly wrecked by someone who may not know it yet.

A culture that plays a song like this gets infatuation at its most innocent: a person happily undone by a crush, daydreaming and hoping for a sign. Crowds absorb longing framed as sweet and harmless, a familiar rite of young attraction with no cruelty or ego in it. There is warmth in that and nothing damaging. Underneath, the song stays entirely on the surface of the feeling, all flutter and hope with nothing examined, and it hangs a good deal of happiness on whether one person calls back. Repeated widely, it mostly keeps a tender, familiar picture of the crush in circulation. It lands as giddy and gentle, a snapshot of a society that still finds the helpless early rush of liking someone worth singing about.