2 posts tagged “female”

    Here's a haunting little tune! A new wife who fights the ghost of her husband's deceased first spouse. Jessi Colter wrote the song, and sang and played piano on the recording.
    Two elements are at work here. The lyrics and the passion in the melody, of course, but for me, the most interesting part of this song was that piano!
    Slightly out of tune with that honky-tonk tone, but played as though all the bar's patrons had left while a breeze through an open window blows out the stench of tobacco smoke and overflowing urinals. This was also the first song I ever picked out on a piano, and mastering that slightly out-of-time harmony was a bear, let me tell you.
    "My eyes are not blue, but mine won't leave you." Wow, what a line! So much imagery in those ten short words. The dead blue eyes of a cold, buried wife, the firey-eyed rage that only love can conjure, a bit of contempt for the previous woman for causing such pain in her husband, and finally the continuing love of the living. This is the summit of songwriting, and indeed, this was the only successful song for Jessi Colter.

    Nancy Sinatra's These Boots Were Made For Walking (1966) was the first album that made an impression on me, a deep lasting impression that exists now forty years later. Although I was seven at the time, I had already embraced the joys of two girlfriends and the heartbreak of losing each, so many of the themes on Boots were somewhat familiar to me, and of those themes that were then still beyond my experience, I learned the lessons from songs like "Boots..." and "Lies".
    The song that has had the greatest impact on me is the one linked at right, "In My Room", a proto-goth ditty that tells much but leaves even more to be imagined. By the way, I noticed that few sites have the correct lyrics. Here they are:

In my room
down at the end of the hall.
I sit and I stare at the wall.
Each day is just like the last
for I live
in the past.

In my room
where every night is the same.
I play a dangerous game.
I keep pretending he's late
and I sit
and I wait.

Over there is the picture
we took when he made me his bride.
Over there is the chair
where he held me whenever I cried.
Over there by the window
the flowers he left
have all died.

In my room
down at the end of the hall.
I sit at I stare at the wall,
hating how lonely I've grown
all alone
in my room.