Lost
You were there before me.
When you didn’t leave, I just couldn’t believe it, I
Just let you adore me,
Content to play all the cards as they were dealt, and I
Made a show of drifting through,
And when we fought you simply thought that my
Making up was making do.
It wasn’t true.
I needed you, but you…
Knew this all before me.
The comforting sighs and the half-hearted lies, yet you
Made excuses for me
Till it became clear that it wasn’t just fear in my eyes.
Waking up at five a.m.
To find you gone
We argued in the dawn and all the
Mocking birds consumed our words,
And had I stayed I would have heard you say that you…
Would no long wait there for me.
A dog has his day then he goes his own way, now there’s
Nothing left here for me
Where your heart should belong but the couple of songs I still play.
Since you left before me
The summer you ruled like the sun has now cooled and I
Need you to restore me.
The night has come down and the moon wears the frown of a fool.
1982
PS
Well, this is a cheerful little number and no mistake. The content suggests some kind of replay of a youthful love affair gone sour, but the style is for me very early to mid-80s, a dismal period when my life seemed to have stalled and nothing much was happening. It was an effort to pick up the pen or the guitar in those days because there was little prospect of anything I wrote ever seeing the light of day, even if I could cobble together something I was halfway satisfied with. There were no shows to prepare for, and everything I sent out on spec always came straight back with no interest shown. So yes, self-pity and despair vie for supremacy, a sure recipe for failure with the inevitable outcome that everyone ends up depressed.
In my files I see I had this listed under the name of the person who inspired it, but now looking back from calmer times, with a more reliable sense of generosity and perspective, I see it would be grossly unfair to include that name because I was just looking for an excuse. ‘Lost’ is certainly what I was at the time. But weirdly, I chose to set it with a fairly brisk rhythm – almost a march – with lots of my favourite major 7th chords scattered about. The accompaniments I had started to come up with were certainly more lively than they had been even when the subject matter barely warranted it. I don’t know if this means anything – that the misery was a pose? That things weren’t really as bad as I liked to pretend?
Certainly felt bad enough at the time. The days were certainly empty and the nights were long and dark. And I sure got through a lot of videos. Catch-22? Know it off by heart. Claude Lelouch’s La Bonne Année? I learnt the phrase “Chapeaux pour le môme” from that film, it’s an idiom which we might render as “give the boy his due” or, more literally, “hats off to the kid”. Foreign language films were always good for that kind of thing. While there was every chance I might eventually end up in the gutter, at least I could try and make sure I was one of the best-educated drop-outs down there.
And at least I couldn’t claim a woman drove me to it. There had never been enough women to blame, and every one I’d known intimately had been lovely to me, and probably even more patient than I knew. None of them deserved a song like this, least of all the one whose name I put in the title. Shame on me. Must do better. Luckily, eventually, I did. But it doesn’t hurt to be reminded sometimes how tough things can get if you take your eye off the ball, and forget to look after yourself. Just don’t expect anyone else to feel sorry for you simply because you wrote some stupid song about it.