Following Lyrics
Always following you around
You say I'm a hopeless case
Run an obsession into the ground
You call me a shadowing fool
Look over your shoulder
And you say I'm haunting you
Why do you look for me
Why do your eyes follow me the way they do
Yeah, so I stand accused
Of causing all the trouble
After high school
Between him and you
You call me a shadowing fool
But I was a good girl
Yeah, 'til you taught me
What it means to be true
I know you look for me
Why do your eyes follow me the way they do
At first this always seemed to me to be a total stalker song.
But I think its more about him stalking her, but making it look like the other way around. She got between him and a friend of his and now he pretends like he hates her, but he's still following her and calling her.
I think its a totally great song, underrated. In fact the entire album is really good. Walk Like an Egyptian is my least favorite song on it.
I know it sounds like a "boy/girl" song, but try to listen to it as a "girl/girl" song. Makes much more sense.
It feels like when you get dumped, and you are trying to move on from relationship, but someone who dumped you keep you in contact. Making it much harder to move on.
Sounds more of a girl/girl song than a girl/boy song. Try to imagine it that way when you listen to it.
I think it's definitely a girl/girl song, and the more I think about it, the more I think the "relationship" is almost entirely imaginary on the part of the singer. The singer is the stalker-y one, but she justifies her own obsession with the idea (which I take to be entirely in her head) that the target it obsessed with her. She's not actually calling her, looking for her, or following her with her eyes except in the sense that she's keeping track of the crazy chick's movements.
And "the trouble after high school" stems from some public altercation that made "him" think the target actually was cheating on him with the singer.
I don't think the relationship is entirely in someone's head. I've always heard it as a lesbian singing to a friend who experimented with her when they were teenagers, to the point that the singer thought of them as girlfriends. But either it was never as serious to the other girl, or it was at odds with the conventional life she planned for herself. After high school, she got involved with a guy and tried to put some distance there, and the singer reacted badly. The singer didn't want to let go. She wants to believe she meant something. And maybe she did/does, or maybe she's just overinterpreting things.
It's open to interpretation, and that veiled quality is part of what makes it striking. There's also anger in it, hurt, need. It's obviously a personal song. The writer (whose sexual orientation I don't know) has said she was writing about her "high-school sweetheart." A lot more gay people were closeted or in denial even when the song was recorded in the mid '80s, let alone in the time period it presumably would be written about (the early '70s, going by when the writer would have been in high school).