This is a hauntingly beautiful song about introspection, specifically about looking back at a relationship that started bad and ended so poorly, that the narrator wants to go back to the very beginning and tell himself to not even travel down that road. I believe that the relationship started poorly because of the lines:
"Take me back to the night we met:When the night was full of terrors: And your eyes were filled with tears: When you had not touched me yet"
So, the first night was not a great start, but the narrator pursued the relationship and eventually both overcame the rough start to fall in love with each other:
"I had all and then most of you"
Like many relationships that turn sour, it was not a quick decline, but a gradual one where the narrator and their partner fall out of love and gradually grow apart
"Some and now none of you"
Losing someone who was once everything in your world, who you could confide in, tell your secrets to, share all the most intimate parts of your life, to being strangers with that person is probably one of the most painful experiences a person can go through. So Painful, the narrator wants to go back in time and tell himself to not even pursue the relationship.
This was the perfect song for "13 Reasons Why"
A Chicago needle took her in the summer
I pawned our shit and caught a bus out west
I got off the Greyhound in a corn and cattle town
Because the name recalled my mother's place of rest
It seemed like a haven for clean Christian maidens
Who'll love a man despite the holes he's made
But the scourge arrived a decade before I did
Provided by the trailer parade
New Virginia, Iowa
Virgin land apart from who I was
New Virginia, Iowa
Poisoned boys do as poison does
Cornfields can't quite cover the bodies of our lovers
Singing from the Cook County morgue
I managed to bandage my memory of the damage
With the sheets of the clerk from the store next door
She had left the church when her cursing father left her in the lurch
She told me sleep is for the old
I met her friends tending bar when harvest ended
So wide awake I couldn't feel the cold
New Virginia, Iowa
Virgin land apart from who I was
New Virginia, Iowa
Poisoned boys do as poison does
For our sins, we've got modern bathtub gin
It's a long night, a long night to go
And I know in the shack on Felton's curve
I'll get, I'll get what I deserve
Lord, steady my nerves
The lives we've led are never really dead
Nor the psalms that set the bombs off in our heads
By the time I'm clean this prairie will mean nothing to me
I'll curse another place instead
Whoa, it's a long night, a long night to go
I pawned our shit and caught a bus out west
I got off the Greyhound in a corn and cattle town
Because the name recalled my mother's place of rest
It seemed like a haven for clean Christian maidens
Who'll love a man despite the holes he's made
But the scourge arrived a decade before I did
Provided by the trailer parade
New Virginia, Iowa
Virgin land apart from who I was
New Virginia, Iowa
Poisoned boys do as poison does
Cornfields can't quite cover the bodies of our lovers
Singing from the Cook County morgue
I managed to bandage my memory of the damage
With the sheets of the clerk from the store next door
She had left the church when her cursing father left her in the lurch
She told me sleep is for the old
I met her friends tending bar when harvest ended
So wide awake I couldn't feel the cold
New Virginia, Iowa
Virgin land apart from who I was
New Virginia, Iowa
Poisoned boys do as poison does
For our sins, we've got modern bathtub gin
It's a long night, a long night to go
And I know in the shack on Felton's curve
I'll get, I'll get what I deserve
Lord, steady my nerves
The lives we've led are never really dead
Nor the psalms that set the bombs off in our heads
By the time I'm clean this prairie will mean nothing to me
I'll curse another place instead
Whoa, it's a long night, a long night to go
Lyrics submitted by uublog
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