Somedays

For me, this is a classic tale of rejection.

The main character asks someone's father for his daughter's hand in marriage, to which he receives a prompt refusal. The daughter probably felt for his plight and attempted to comfort him, only sparking more anger and frustration from the young man.

Though the woman may try, the man is inconsolable and refuses her sympathy (don't call me, don't write).

He doesn't want any of their shallow compassion and grows increasingly frustrated as they continue to be kind and loving.

I'm probably overthinking it, but that's what it means to me.

Ok, so I may be way off here, but I think I've made sense of this song.

I think it is about someone with bipolar disorder, where the person has two distinctly opposite personalities: one is extremely depressed and the other is extremely carefree and happy. The person is singing about her personalities, if that makes any sense... She wants to be happy and carefree all the time. I feel this desire to be happy all the time is represented by the tone of the music: it is happy, soothing, and carefree throughout the whole song. But the depression keeps sinking in and messing up her happiness.

The first verse: "Somedays aren't yours at all They come and go as if they're someone elses days They come and leave you behind someone elses face And it's harsher than yours And colder than yours They come in all quiet sweep up and then they leave And you don't hear a single floor board creak They're so much stronger than the friends you try to keep by your side"

She is describing the how the depression is making her life difficult. In this verse, the "you" she is singing to is who she feels she really is inside (the happy personality). Somedays aren't happy, and these depressed times keep coming and going. "They come and leave you behind someone else's face", meaning after she comes out of her depression, she expects everything to be ok, but it isn't because people view her as the depressed person. There is another side to her that keeps coming in and screwing up her life. When she is in a good mood, she tries to fix the damage she caused when she was depressed, but the depression is so strong that it is causing her to lose everyone that she is trying to keep close to her.

The next section: "Downtown, downtown I'm not here, not anymore I've gone away Don't call me don't write"

"Downtown" is the depressed personality. She doesn't want to be depressed anymore. She is in her good mood and is telling the depressed mood to leave her alone pretty much.

"I'm in love with your daughter I want to have her baby I'm in love with your daughter So can I please"

She is still singing to the depression. I feel like this is a metaphor. Everytime after the depression, the happiness is "born" again. She is telling the bad mood that she is in love with its daughter, the good mood. And she doesn't want the good mood to keep leading to more bad moods. Instead, she wants the good moods to "give birth" to more good moods. She is metaphorically asking the depression's permission to "marry" the good mood so she can permanently become the person she feels she truly is and wants to be all the time. It is a continuation of the section above, asking the depression to leave her happiness alone.

"Downtown, downtown I'm not here Not anymore I've gone away don't call me don't write I've gone away don't call me don't write"

Same meaning as before.

Ending: "Somedays aren't yours at all They come and go as if they're someone elses days They come and leave you behind someone elses face And it's harsher than yours"

The ending could have an optimistic or a pessimistic meaning (listener's choice): Optimistic: It is a continuation of the previous sections. She is still singing to the depression when she says, "Somedays aren't yours at all". She has beat the depression and she no longer has days where it takes over. The days that used to belong to the depression now belong to someone else (the happiness) and they leave the depression with a happy face. =) But the last line, "And it's harsher than yours" leads me to believe its more pessimistic: In that case, the depression has come back again and the ending has the same meaning as the first verse.

This--I find--is another of Spektor's songs which have the connotation of suicide and/or depression, but the music deters the message.

This one could be about wasting away in an apartment; living without the zeal to even get up from the bed, couch, whatever. Or it could be about loss. Then there's the lines about someone's daughter, which sticks out like a sore thumb.

This song is more complicated than most of her's, really.

There's that instrumental part where it's violins and Regina making a kind of raspberries-humming sound... It kills me. It feels like a child crying, it just kills me.

regina's songs are rarely if ever autobiographical.

I can identify with this song a lot. I know personally the feeling of being so caught up with everything I have to do for school and work and society that I don't take time to notice the simple things. The days just slip right by without me even noticing.

I can identify even more if its a "queer" song.

I think this song is about a mental illness. Not so much depression. But more so something that causes confusion and makes it hard to live your life alone. That would explain the "I'm in love with your daughter". She's in a state of confusion. Maybe it's split personality disorder. Then there is brief moments where she knows what's happening, "I'm not here, Not anymore. Don't call me, don't write." It's kind of like she's telling her friends and family that she's not going to get better and it'd be easier on them if they just erased her from her memory. It also sounds like she's in a mental institution with the lines about them coming in and sweeping then leaving. That`s what I think.

Definitely one of her best songs. Well-written and leaves a lot to the imagination-->I love that!

Such a beautiful song.

Somedays aren't yours at all They come and go as if they're someone elses days

These lines evoke a feeling of wasting away what time you have, while you know that others are using all of their time. It makes me think of wasting time with someone by not telling them how you feel.

Like many others I identify with this song alot, but everyone have their own story for it.

For me it's about searching for something or someone that makes you feel complete. And how the desperation of that search makes you hurt others as well as yourself.

"Somedays aren't yours at all They come and go as if they're someone elses days They come and leave you behind someone elses face And it's harsher than yours And colder than yours They come in all quiet sweep up and then they leave And you don't hear a single floor board creak They're so much stronger than the friends you try to keep by your side"

This is a description of the emptyness inside that just grows and grows, and you want to fill it so badly that you tell yourself fall in love with anyone you meet, but you soon realize that you feel even more lonely with someone you don't really connect with. So you continously leave your lovers behind to find the one that's right for you. And this behaviour hurts the ones you break up with, and it makes you look kinda cheap and it's hard to keep up relations with people that don't understand what you're going through and why you keep doing the same mistake again and again.

"Downtown, downtown I'm not here, not anymore I've gone away Don't call me don't write"

This is the part when you're with someone, maybe you've settled down for a while but you still feel that it's something or someone else you're supposed to be with. So this is the break-up note, the part where you once again leave the one you're with behind and just drop everything and go out to keep trying to fill the void inside. You can't explain why or how so you don't want to be confronted by him/her, you just want him/her to let you slip away.

"I'm in love with your daughter I want to have her baby I'm in love with your daughter So can I please"

This is the lover stating his/her true love for you, he/she's fallen for you and thought he/she was the one who could hold you down and make you happy, so he/she is not yet accepting that he/she's just another of the hearts you've broken on the way.

So, to me this is a song about not having control or knowledge of your own feelings. You do the same mistake, get hurt and hurt others in the same manner time after time, but your heart is so focused on finding the cure for your emptiness that you can't stop yourself. In a bigger picture you could replace the love affairs with for example some sort of drug abuse or any other kind of selfdestructive lack of control and search for something you can't put your finger on yet can't live without.

okay. Im going to describe this in a weird way.. but I picture it as if it is a video/movie it isn’t a specific setting.. could be in a different country, in earlier times, now, whatever the beginning shows two people who are performing the daily tasks that they have to do, but they feel vacant, as if they aren’t themselves. it must be someone else who is in this lonely situation. they feel as if this must not be their reality they’re just dreaming or watching a movie or reading… their life would be.. has to be better…
but they know inside it is really happening to them.

Then they’re trying to surround themselves with friends and stay busy so that they can keep their minds of off each other. But that vacant lonely feeling is overpowering everything. They cant stop thinking about what happened. In the next scene the guy has called her or written her letters/emailed her, and the girl is replying by telling the guy to leave her alone. She’s gone. She can’t see him and she doesn’t want him to keep contacting her... you can see by her face that she is filled with longing when she hears his voice. And then the "i'm in love with your daughter" part is a flashback. We see a time when the guy asked or begged the girls’ father to let him marry her, but for some reason they cannot be together even though she truly loves him. (whether it be because her parents won’t allow the relationship.. she’s going away to a college or career she’s been working for all of her life.. she’s in an arranged marriage... she's got some fatal disease and she’s trying to keep him from getting hurt.. ) but she still loves him and wants him to leave her alone because it hurts too much to hear from him and have him there still trying to convince her to be with him. then at the end of the story I would imagine that each of them ended up living their own lives and one of them marries somebody else. The other hasn’t been married. And each of them have a box full of the letters they’d written or memories of each other hidden away in a closet or under the bed.