I was goofing around in the “What Does a Bull Moose Believe” thread, and I posted a link to this song (you all know it, I’m sure) with the lyrics attached. I don’t really pay much attention to pop lyrics, but this one was so completely incoherent I watched that video three times just to understand the level of brain-damage I was dealing with there.
Here’s the lyrics–please review them and let me know if I just had a stroke or something, and everyone else can understand wtf the singer is babbling about. To me, it looks like someone tore up a 1912 Farmer’s Almanac and pasted the words together to get this mixed-up gibberish.
it isn’t very complicated. the woman in the song ran into some guy she knew when she was younger who had a crush on her. he pressed her into a conversation she wanted to avoid, so she put up with it long enough to be polite and then beat feet. the guy wanted her so desperately that he deluded himself into thinking that he had a chance with her because she had smiled politely at him or something in the past, and he confused polite with attracted.
Looks to me like a song about a guy who’s hung up on a girl who was never that into him, and how he’s trying to convince anyone who’ll listen that he still has a shot with her.
Exactly. And the whole “what a fool believes, a wise man has no power to reason away” bit means that no matter how the ‘wise man’ tries, he’s not gonna convince a fool out of his delusions. Which implies that even after this girl disses him, the sentimental twit is still gonna think they had a connection they never really shared.
I rather like those lines now that I know what the heck he’s singing. Michael McDonald’s voice has always been too Muppety for me to understand. (I still love him though; he’s a damn good singer. This song makes me very nostalgic for junior high!)
The analogy I always use is: imagine that 35 year old Charlie Brown runs into the 35 year “Little Red-Haired Girl.”
He spent years pining away for her. She barely knew he existed. Picture him approaching her, making small talk, trying to reminisce about good times he imagines they shared. She says, “And you are…? Oh yeah, Charlie. Right. Well, nice seeing you again. Whoa, look at the time. Gotta run! We must get together some time. Bye!”
“Anybody else would surely know” that she thinks he’s a loser, that she’s just walked out on him forever. But lovesick Charlie Brown still imagines he has a chance with her.
“What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
What seems to be is always better than nothing.”
That means there’s no use trying to TELL Charlie Brown that he’s wasting his time. A deluded fool sees what he wants to see. And Charlie is HAPPIER with his delusion, because a fantasy love is better than no love at all."
You just had a stroke or something. The lyrics are simple and straightforward.
That’s a great song. Michael McDonald has a hell of a voice any way you look at it, despite the fact that most people of my generation know him as a joke from The 40 Year Old Virgin.
It’s not particularly difficult to understand if you think about it but it is remarkably wordy for a song.
The guy didn’t just have a crush on her at one point. They were lovers, but they broke up long ago. They meet again years later, and he’s still in love with her. She hardly remembers who he is. I’ve read an interview with Michael McDonald in which he talks about this song. He gives this interpretation. I don’t have any citation for this though.
Maybe that’s McDonald’s interpretation, but the lyrics say something else,
“She had a place in his life.
He never made her think twice.”
That sounds like she meant the world top him, while she barely even noticed him.
And “Trying hard to re-create what had yet to be created” makes it sound as if he’s reminiscing about a relationship that never really happened in the first place.
“She musters a smile for his nostalgic tale.”
She listens for a few seconds, smiles politely.
“As he rises to her apology…”
They’re sitting down together, she gets bored/weirded out by the conversation, stands up and says “Whoa, I’m so sorry, I have to be going” and scrams.
Upon reflection, I must concede that the lyrics work equally well if the man and the woman HAD once had a fling a long time ago, a fling that meant a lot more to him than it did to her.
If THAT’S the case, the man is vainly trying to rekindle emotions that SHE never felt.
By “they were lovers,” I didn’t mean that there was a long relationship. I mean that they slept together a few times. She got tired of him and broke it off. When they ran into each other a few years later, he was still in love with her, but she barely remembered him.