Nobody's Baby Now

To me this song is about a guy whose girl has left him and he can't quite grasp that it's over.

The first verse is about him trying to come to terms with what went wrong, trying to understand why she left him, or maybe how she could have left him.

I get the impression that he drove her away. I always imagine him to be plagued by demons, in my mind its always self loathing or something like that, he can’t truly love her like she loves him till he stops hating himself and being so self destructive.

I think that she tried to cope with this because she loved him and thought he could be saved, but eventually she’d had enough and had to leave him. The narrator’s difficulty in accepting her leaving him is down to how many ‘second chances’ she’s given him. How, no matter what he does, they’re still together, but this time, they’re not.

The second verse is how much a part of him she is, why he finds it so hard without her. The line “but there are some things love won't allow” alludes to him doing something that pushed her over the edge of what she could cope with, making her decide to leave him.

I’m pushed towards this theory by the line “I was her cruel-hearted man” because it makes me think of someone being selfish in a relationship, not appreciating what the other person needs out of the relationship. Maybe he never truly realised until now how much he needed her and is a little remorseful at having let it slip by, realising more and more just how much she meant to him.

The title and chorus, “she’s nobody’s baby now” refers to the pet names we give to loved ones, how those people become our baby’s and honey’s, etc, becoming so familiar and intimate to us, knowing them so well, but when everything’s over, they go back to being just Alice, Jane, Sally, whoever.