The 1980s File Feature
Things Can Only Get Better
Things Can Only Get Better — Howard Jones and the Sound of OptimismImagine the spring of 1985: shoulder pads and synthesizers, Live Aid on the horizon, the C…
01 The Story
Things Can Only Get Better — Howard Jones and the Sound of Optimism
Imagine the spring of 1985: shoulder pads and synthesizers, Live Aid on the horizon, the Cold War still a real anxiety despite the consumer boom all around it. Radio that year was awash in processed drum machines and glassy keyboards, the texture of a decade that had decided style was substance and technology was destiny. Into that sound world came a British singer-songwriter whose particular vision of electronic pop carried, against the odds, a note of genuine philosophical uplift. Howard Jones's Things Can Only Get Better was a song that dared the mid-1980s to agree that optimism was a serious intellectual position, and millions of listeners took the dare.
Howard Jones in 1985
Jones had arrived in the British charts in 1983 as something of a curiosity: a solo performer who played synthesizers and keyboard instruments live, often accompanied by a mime, positioning himself somewhere between the art-school cool of synth-pop's avant-garde and the mainstream accessibility of Radio 1 playlists. By 1985 he had achieved genuine commercial standing on both sides of the Atlantic. His debut album Human's Lib had reached number one in the UK, and the follow-up Dream Into Action, the record that housed Things Can Only Get Better, was building toward similar success. The American market, always more resistant to British synth-pop's philosophical tendencies, was warming to him.
A Remarkable Chart Run
The song's performance on the Billboard Hot 100 stands as one of the more impressive slow-burn chart runs of the decade. Debuting at number 75 on March 23, 1985, it climbed steadily through the spring, ascending week by week with the methodical patience of a song that was genuinely connecting with radio audiences rather than front-loaded on hype. It reached its peak of number 5 on June 15, 1985, a position that placed it firmly among the year's major pop events. The total run stretched to 23 weeks on the Hot 100, a figure that speaks to sustained radio affection well beyond the initial promotional push.
The Sound and Production
The production of Things Can Only Get Better is characteristic of its moment while also transcending it. The synthesizer textures are unmistakably mid-1980s, but Jones's arrangement has a clarity and melodic intelligence that kept the song fresh long after the decade's more purely fashion-driven records had dated irreparably. The dynamic structure builds with genuine purpose: the verses set up philosophical propositions and the chorus delivers them with the kind of release that makes the whole thing feel earned rather than manufactured. His vocal performance is warm and committed, selling the optimism without tipping into saccharine territory.
Legacy and Endurance
The song's philosophical argument, that suffering has an arc and that things improve if you engage with the world honestly, found new audiences across subsequent decades and achieved a second life as an anthem. Its chart endurance across nearly half a year on the Hot 100 says everything about how deeply it connected with American radio audiences in that particular summer. Press play and let the production transport you; there is something both of its time and genuinely timeless in the way those keyboards open up.
“Things Can Only Get Better” — Howard Jones's singular moment on the 1980s charts.
02 Song Meaning
Things Can Only Get Better — A Philosophical Case for Optimism
Pop music in the mid-1980s was not generally a place where philosophical propositions went to be tested. The decade's dominant pop sensibility was hedonistic and surface-focused, celebrating pleasure and style in ways that actively resisted deeper claims. What made Howard Jones unusual, and what made Things Can Only Get Better resonate so broadly despite its intellectual ambitions, was his ability to embed genuine ideas in the machinery of irresistible pop music.
The Central Argument
The song advances a specific claim: that the experience of suffering, properly understood and actively engaged with, contains within itself the seed of improvement. This is not the passive optimism of someone who has never experienced difficulty; the lyrics acknowledge pain and loss directly before turning toward the future. The move the song makes is from acknowledgment to agency. The improvement promised in the title is not something that happens to you; it is something you choose to move toward. That distinction gives the optimism moral weight rather than mere cheerfulness.
Eastern Philosophy and Western Pop
Jones was openly influenced by Buddhist and broader Eastern philosophical traditions in his songwriting during this period, and those influences surface in the way Things Can Only Get Better approaches suffering. The Buddhist understanding that suffering is a fundamental condition of existence, but not a permanent state, resonates through the song's logic. For the mainstream pop audience encountering these ideas through a Radio 1 or Top 40 lens, this was genuinely unusual material, delivered in a format that made it accessible without emptying it of substance.
1985 and the Need for Uplift
The cultural context of the song's success matters. The mid-1980s were a period of genuine anxiety beneath the decade's glossy surface: nuclear tension, AIDS, economic inequality that the consumer boom was papering over. A song that addressed suffering honestly and then argued that things could improve landed with audiences who were ready for that particular combination of acknowledgment and hope. The year's other pop events often avoided difficulty entirely; Jones walked directly into it and came out the other side.
Why It Endures
The song's durability across forty years of cultural change comes down to the universality of its core proposition. Every generation has its reasons to need the reassurance that things can improve. The specific 1985 synthesizers and the particular Mid-80s production palette have, for many listeners, become nostalgic pleasures in their own right rather than barriers to entry. But even stripped of those associations, the emotional argument at the center of the song holds. It is a serious piece of optimism, and serious optimism never entirely goes out of fashion.
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