It's a Karla Bonoff song, and she's actually got a really nice version of it herself, but the Linda Ronstadt is the one that got enough radio airplay to catch my attention, somehow only late at night as I recall, so here we are. I only needed to hear it once. It felt like dying inside, like one of those dreams where you're caught naked somewhere you're not supposed to be. It's one obviously for all the lonely people, and if I'm giving away too much about myself with this—which I may or may not be—I'm also pretty sure that everybody out there has to know what this song feels like in some way. At some Dark Night of the Soul level. Has felt the yearning ache alone in bed in the middle of the night. The planet is overcrowded, everybody on TV is coupled up and happy as hell, so are half the people walking around in the songs and movies, and all the rest are having dramatic breakups and quickly moving on to next partners. This song, in its arguable self-pitying solipsism and self-centered baby boomer ingratitude, speaks for the rest of us: Can't I just please get some just a little bit of that for myself, once in awhile, maybe? Is it so much to ask? "People all over the world are starvin' just for affection," as Jonathan Richman reminded us earlier. The immediacy of that starvation lives in every measure of this song, desperately. It occupies a kind of miraculous hushed space of fragile piano and human voice and swelling sound. It's a bummer, it's haunting, it's depressing—it might even be depressed itself. But you know how true it is too.
This is one of those songs that make me mourn the loss of the life I never had. The regret over having to do something you don't want to and the justification for doing the things you thought you had to is totally captured in the haunting sound of this song...and it has for over 30 years...
ReplyDeleteIt's never too late as long as you are alive.
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