I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love with You

I love the turn in the 4th verse... I hope YOU don't fall in love with ME.

After exposing all of his fears of commitment he realizes he is falling for her and now must face the realization she may return the favor. You can feel the pain of a man afraid of commitment in this song. He fumbles and worries and once he finally gets the confidence to face her, well it was too late. She is gone. And he knows he missed his shot.

Very well done.

Don't know what you mean morag, I drink stout and I'm as do-able as they come.

One of my favourite songs of all time.

From the album closing time with very nice sounding Waits vocals. I love Tom's voice on every album as it suits the lyrics as does his voice on this very beautiful album. The lyrics are not as complex as later in his career but a great album all the same that regularly gets played in my house. After a Work Xmas party I came home, lit a Cuban cigar and listened to this album, both sides and for the first time in a long time I felt love for a girl from work who was in a relationship with another guy at the time. This song really hit home like never before. She not long after left her guy and I was also recently single. We were both in pretty soul destroying relationships and to cut a long story short we are now together with a 9 month year old gift from God. This song and album will always have a special place in my heart as I really didn't want to fall in love with her as she was taken but it was obviously meant to be and I'm as happy as Iv ever been. Tom- come to Aus again, I'm dying to see u live!!

What?! Of course he's being serious! This is one of the very few songs I've ever heard where I can actually feel chemistry between two people, I don't know how to explain it, this song just makes me so happy. It's like two ordinary, middle-aged people experiencing love at first sight in a bar, and I always thought the way Tom sings the line "The guy your with he's up and split, the chair next to you is free" was so hopeful like he really depended on it. I adore this song!

Such a good song. It's pretty straightforward.

Okay, the whole stout debate is taking away from the song here. And a stout is just a dark beer and most guys were I come from drink dark beer AND whiskey. It's also just a rhyming device, so I think everyone is over thinking it a bit. This song, to me, is just about a lonely guy seeing a beautiful woman and fantasizing about a chance encounter. Although, I do find Mistermooks subtext angle a pretty viable argument. In any case, the song and the words put me in a nice place. This entire album puts me in a nice, peaceful frame of mind.

I apologise for the stout. Just trying to make a point that this is one of the most intelligent songwriters we have & it's only to be expected that his songs will work on more than one level. So you might listen to it when you're in love & hear a love song, but in a more cynical frame of mind you'll hear something else. There's a definite subtext that this guy is a loser & a fantasist & only really falls for this beautiful stranger when she's safely vanished. It's even clearer in the earlier version of the song, where the more beers he has the more he feels this woman is communicating with him. I think Mistermook got it about right.

I see it as a guy who's not in love with the woman but in love with the idea of love itself, so much so that he projects it onto any attractive stranger that he sees through his alcoholic haze, constructing a drunken reverie which dissipates as she leaves. He doesn't love the woman...he hasn't even talked to her, but the idea of the love that he can't find, because he doesn't even have the courage to ask for a cigarette, makes him wallow in his self-pity.

As someone said previously, this song is not to be taken literally, or that is my believing. It is about a man who is denying his feeling towards a woman. He doesn’t want to fall in love, because it makes him depressed. /The music plays and you display your heart for me to see/ I had a beer and now I hear you calling out for me/ The playing music refers to emotions she exposes for him to se and the effect this has on him is like beer. Alcohol makes him more in touch with emotions.
He wants to get to know her, but he is afraid of getting hurt although he is already on his way. The guy she was with has left and he has a chance to step in, because he can see that she is just as lonely as he. But he hasn’t got the guts to approach her; he is hiding behind his fear of being blue, even though he is already lonely and has not much to lose.

Now it's closing time, the music's fading out Last call for drinks, I'll have another stout. Well I turn around to look at you, you're nowhere to be found, I search the place for your lost face, guess I'll have another round And I think that I just fell in love with you. In the end of the song he knows it is time for him to make his move towards her. But because he has waited too long she disappears and is nowhere to be found. In the last line he admits that he has fallen in love with her. All trough the song he has been denying it in a way and hoping he was not in love. When she is gone he feels he can be true because there is no longer a danger of falling in love and being blue, because she is gone. In a way he tricks himself because he has fallen in love, but he let her slip away and now he will feel blue.

This is a very simple story of the guy at the bar, see's the girl, but does not have the courage to approach, and, after a night of thinking, after the next one I'll talk to her, consoles himself, after shes gone with the fact that he was about to approach, but she'd left, hence leaving him with some drunk dignity....