(written February 2013)
I must have listened to this song of hers a million times (a gross exaggeration, but a few hundred times might not be), without fully realizing its full impact, or even what the song is really about.
I took it for a typical heart break song – even though her brilliant singing supported by well-crafted jazz-like musical arrangement made it more than typical pop stuff from the radio.
As with her poetry, however, the song and its performance says a lot about her and her past, how detached she can appear on the surface even when internally in total emotional turmoil.
Even more so, the song reveals a past that is full of love won and love lost, of deception and self-deception, and depth of anguish and her ability to strike back through her art.
The song seems to show her ability to maintain her public composure even when she is being torn apart emotionally in private.
The song is being sung to someone she clearly loved, but a man who had found excuses not to be with her, a man who makes claims about her he is using as excuse to move on.
Although performed sophistically, the song has a basic pop structure (modified slightly) with verses and chorus, but with a moderate jazz substructure, and powerful singing. We get an intro that includes drums and piano, an interlude between choruses of piano, drums and guitar, and an outro that is a reprise of the intro. Clever piano tinkering comes just prior to the singing and fills in at points later in the song.
Although this is a break up song, it never mopes. The is no musical melodrama. The music never falters even when the lyrics depict some painful emotional past, leaving this to her amazing voice, at those moments when it shifts out of the didactic verses and gets pumped up by the clear pain of the chorus, her voice often slipping into – if not jazz scat – then into something that resembles yet another instrument, weaving below and around the other instruments before returning to the verses again.
Yet as well crafted as the musical component is (and it is truly tight especially when the instruments make brief but potent shifts in tempo and key), it is the lyrics that stunned me most during more recent listening, after having failed to truly appreciate what was being said and how it was being said prior to this. In my defense, I was lulled in previous listening by the power of her voice, failing to appreciate her craft as a poet and songwriter.
Her voice has the ability to entice a listener into listening to its ups and downs and its emotional turmoil, rather than paying full attention to the other things going on in her songs – and in this song in particular.
The stunning part of her lyrics is that she wrote them in her late teens or early twenties, demonstrating her deep understanding of romantic entanglement, and in this song, a struggle going back “across the years.”
She reflects on her disillusionment with a man who she claims once seemed to sparkle, but no longer does.
But the poem is a kind of one-sided boxing match in which she is taking jabs at him, getting even for the hurt she feels he’s caused her.
“Where were you when the hand outs were given?” she sings, possibly making reference to an old insult asking: “where were you when God handed out brains?”
But then, she goes on to question his sincerity, asking: “Where were you went a smile was just a smile,” suggesting his smile can’t be trusted and that his smile might mean something else.
“I always wondered when prudence passed you by,” she sings.
This song like some of her poems is her chance to strike back at the man who has wounded her deeply, and to make it clear he has no regard for the way she feels.
“If it helps you to pretend, I’m not feeling anything, help you to forget me,” she sings. If it fits to think I never loved you, then that’s what you should do.”
She alters the chorus slightly later, but continues to make case in the next verse, saying she’s tired for all the feelings of emptiness, and perhaps alludes to something he did, which included “a rose and good bye,” – explaining why she later claimed to hate people giving her flowers and candy.
Yet even though she has put on a face of apparent contentment, the whole affair seems to have been more than she could bear, looking back again at what happened to her.
“Where were you when the time came for us to meet?” she sang, then makes it clear that he took advantage of her when she was still an innocent child.
But she knew the routine already, just as she already knew how to cry.
In her return to the final chorus, she alters the content to say he would like to pretend that she is not human, but if he needs to believe she never loved him, then that’s what he should do.
This song stunned me because of the fact that her art was so sophisticated so early in her life. But so did the fact that she had such deep and painful romances upon which she could draw to create that art.
But as she said, she knows the routine, and she knows how to cry.
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