While listening to a song, have you ever gotten the uncanny feeling that a lyric fits your own specific personal circumstances?
Tell us about it.
When I first left my home and moved across the country alone, I very much had B-Movie’s Nowhere Girl running like a tape (no pun intended) in my head. Especially the part:
“Nowhere girl what you had you need,
Nowhere girl all functional and neat,
Nowhere girl in self-imposed exile,
Nowhere girl a martyr-like denial.”
Here’s the song with lyrics
On a related note, I just saw a Dr. Phil rerun (yeah, I know) about a woman named Annie who is convinced Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal was written about her.
After a girl broke up with me, my first serious relationship in college, I had Bob Dylan’s ‘Blood on the Tracks’ and especially the song ‘If you see her, say hello’ on constant replay. Every single word of that song seemed to be written specifically for my former relationship.
Reading back on the lyrics now, they are vague enough that they are like a horoscope that is so unspecific that anybody can relate to it (Except for the ex being in Tangier part, don’t think she ever actually went there). But the real-sounding grief in the way he sang it was as relatable as the lyrics.
Great song and great album. Apparently he denied the album was directly autobiographical about the breakup of his marriage, but I think he doth protested too much. I had owned the album for awhile before the breakup but it hadn’t really registered with me until then. What a great post-breakup album to listen to; it was a great comfort in those days and weeks afterward.
Was she OK about it?
Well, she’d been struck down; it was her doom (and she was telling Dr. Phil about it, so no). She was really gobsmacked to find out that the Annie of the song was inspired by a CPR dummy. Still didn’t change her mind.
It sounds like Annie was NOT ok.
Sometimes I feel like this:
You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
(Time by Pink Floyd)
20 years ago I had traveled to South Africa to meet a woman I had connected with online.
No, it wasn’t a scam, but the clickage faded instantly upon first ftf meeting.
My soundtrack for the trip was Delerium’s Poem, inside cover w/ all sorts of African animals.
We went our separate ways, and I drove to a small town on the coast, St. Lucia & its bay. The song A Poem For Byzantium played as I approached the town’s outer environs:
Unbidden shadows of you formed yesterday
I ran away to a room here on the bay
Interrupted life again, another new beginning
Where the silence echoes
You’re no longer with me
Here and now
I feel that I’m embracing freedom
Even though I may be alone
But that’s okay
I do not seek and do not intend to find
A calmer ocean or a sun that’ll never be mine
My world will never change
And time will bring you to a portent
I’ll move on and forget you all over again
Moving on, I can forgive you all over again
There was a partial eclipse of the sun that weekend (not visible from the states), annnd I took my first swim & boat trip on the Indian Ocean (saw some humpbacks), tho it was fairly rough that day.
Bruce Springsteen’s “Rosalita.”
Tell him this is his last chance
To get his daughter in a fine romance
'Cause the record company, Rosie
Just gave me a big advance.
So, you’d say that…
every one of them words rang true
and glowed like burning coal,
pouring off of every page
like it was written in my soul,
from me to you…
(Tangled Up In Blue.)
.
from ‘Blood on the Tracks’
Ooh, good one. I remember well listening to that at 17 and thinking, no way I’m going to let that happen to me!
Then these days, sometimes I realize, almost 40 years have got behind me since then… 
Yes, I would definitely say that! Lord knows I’ve paid some dues getting through…
That’s exactly what I wanted to post, almost word for word. It was my first real break up with a woman, and all my pain, grief and anger was perfectly expressed in those songs. It’s a fantastic album. Dylan once was complimented by, I think, a journalist, about how much many people enjoyed this album, and he answered (I paraphrase, I don’t remember the exact words) “Enjoyed? How can anybody enjoy so much pain?”.
So you’d say about my post that…
(Me quoting digs quoting Dylan…sorry, getting a little too meta!)
Yes, fantastic album. Still to this day probably my favorite Dylan album and the one of his I most listen to. One day when one of my sons has his first serious breakup I will recommend it to him.
There’s a line in John Moreland’s “Heart’s Too Heavy” that crushes me every time:
Thought I was somebody nobody could love
And if you haven’t met Mr. Moreland, please check him out.
For me, it was Positively 4th Street. Due to the fact that this was someone that I still saw all the time (at the same college, worked at the same place, lots of friends in common, she didn’t seem to understand that I had no interest in being in the same room as her etc), that one really spoke to me. Particularly the line “I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes You’d know what a drag it is to see you”.
Yes, I wondered about the Tangier part too, the rest was just my story.
And then there was my Leonard Cohen phase, were Dress Rehearsal Rag stands out among many other great songs:
Four o’clock in the afternoon
and I didn’t feel like very much.
I said to myself, "Where are you golden boy,
where is your famous golden touch?"
[…]
Once there was a path
and a girl with chestnut hair,
and you passed the summers
picking all of the berries that grew there;
there were times she was a woman,
oh, there were times she was just a child,
and you held her in the shadows
where the raspberries grow wild.
And you climbed the twilight mountains
and you sang about the view,
and everywhere that you wandered
love seemed to go along with you.
That’s a hard one to remember,
yes it makes you clench your fist.
And then the veins stand out like highways,
all along your wrist.
And yes it’s come to this,
it’s come to this,
and wasn’t it a long way down,
wasn’t it a strange way down?
[…]
I still like this song.
Yep. But a different song for me:
I have a song that keeps resonating in different ways, and that is Madonna’s “Human Nature.” She wrote it after receiving blowback from her Sex book. As an anthem for empowering women to embrace their sexuality, it’s great.
But for me it’s about a lot more than that. It’s about speaking up about abuse despite extraordinary social pressure to shut up, it’s about writing candidly about sexuality and following my creative vision no matter what others think about it. Its relevance to my life spans two decades.
Wouldn’t let me say the words I longed to say
You didn’t want to see life through my eyes
You tried to shove me back inside your narrow room
And silence me with bitterness and lies
Did I say something wrong?
Oops, I didn’t know I couldn’t talk about sex
(I must’ve been crazy)
Did I stay too long?
Oops, I didn’t know I couldn’t speak my mind
You punished me for telling you my fantasies
I’m breakin’ all the rules I didn’t make
You took my words and made a trap for silly fools
You held me down and tried to make me break
Did I say something true?
Oops, I didn’t know I couldn’t talk about sex
(I must’ve been crazy)
Did I have a point of view?
Oops, I didn’t know I couldn’t talk about you
And then we have the chorus
I’m not sorry
It’s human nature
I’m not your bitch, don’t hang your shit on me
Thanks, Madonna.
In my twenties I identified with Roy Orbison’s “Windsurfer”.
“He said let’s sail away together
She told him no no never no.”
“Why do we always go for something out of reach?”
If y’all can stand another story of an “after a breakup” song…
This happened several years later on from my ‘Blood on the Tracks’ phase I mentioned up thread-- in my mid to late 20s, after a break up with a girl I had been with for several years and almost proposed to.
Actually early on in that next breakup, when it was still fresh, I’m sure I broke out my Blood on the Tracks album and wore it out all over again. But a few months after that, while I was finally starting to get over her and gain a sense of acceptance, Don Henley’s ‘Heart of the Matter’ was getting a lot of radio play, and the lyrics of that song really spoke to me: