Personally I think this is the best break up song ever… I mean the best break up song that I ever wrote! ;o)
It’s quite “literary” and uses extended conversational dialogue… That’s some pretty fancy songwriting right there if I say so myself! So hopefully you’ll be impressed and awestruck… :o)
I’m trying to take this song seriously. Really I am… But God I was an idiot!
It was the summer of 1979 and I had barely made it through my love sick freshman year of college… I fell in love with a couple girls… ahem, young women… and of course I was totally over the top intense and they being “normal” women in their early 20’s, just wanted to have fun… not make some lifetime soul to soul commitment. LOL…
Anyway this “breaking up” stuff is ultimately ridiculous… Looking back it was totally and completely perfect… I didn’t think so back then though… I thought my life was over!
Anyway we do need to have deep compassion for our younger selves as well as all the love relationships that didn’t work out.
Today I prefer to think of them as “Training Wheels.” What if we thought of our former lovers as “beloved teachers”?
Enjoy the intensity. Admire my wordiness and brilliant guitar playing. Just don’t take it too seriously. ok?
Please click arrow to play:
What I’m Really Saying
Song #31 | July 1979 | CD: Feather On The Wind
She comes out of the dark like Orpheus
And she says, “We are all vast and vague an in the end unknowable.”
“Hold on,” I say. “It’s not that bad…”
“Jesus Christ!,” She says.
“Look at everything we once had!
We go down and down
and never come back up
It drives you to the point
Where a person’ had about enough!”
With that she turns her face to the wall
And for a while she don’t say anything at all
Then she looks up at me and she’s holding back the tears
and she says:
“What I’m really saying is…
I think it’s time we both should know…
What I’m really saying is
I think it’s time for me to go…”
Nobody knows what happens on the inside
When you go from so close to so damn far away
And I can’t help thinking that it’s somebody’s faults
So I say, “You live your life
Like you got some preconceived disease!
And we go down and down
And never come back up
It gets tot he point where person’s had about enough.”
I don’t know what to say anymore
But I know I’m tired of these emotional wars
So I wipe the tears away with the backs of my hands
and I say:
“What you’re really saying is
You think it’s time we both should know
What you’re really saying is
You think it’s time for you to go.”
She goes out the door
Like the streetlights leave at dawn
One minute you see her there and the next minute she’s gone
How come it always has to be this way?
How come the special things in life never seem to stay?
And we go down and down
And never come back up
It drives you to the point where you’ve had about enough
And I don’t know what to do anymore
So I just sit here, spiritually poor
And I can’t help it but her words keep running through my head
And she said:
“What I’m really saying is…
I think it’s time we both should know
What I’m really saying is
I think it’s time for me to go…”
copyright 1979-2015 by Mark Shepard. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
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