She lifts her skirt up to her knees
Walks through the garden rows
With her bare feet laughing

I never learned to count my blessings
I choose instead to dwell
In my disasters

I walk on down the hill
Through grass grown tall
And brown and still
It's hard somehow
To let go of my pain

On past the busted back
Of that old and rusted Cadillac
That sinks into this field
Collecting rain

Will I always feel this way
So empty
So estranged?

And of these cut throat busted sunsets
These cold and damp white mornings
I have grown weary

If through my cracked and dusty
Dime store lips
I spoke these words out loud
Would no one hear me?

Lay your blouse across the chair
Let fall the flowers
From your hair
And kiss me
With that country mouth
So plain

Outside the rain is tapping
On the leaves
To me it sounds like
They're applauding us
The quiet love
We've made

Will I always feel this way
So empty
So estranged?

Well I looked my demons in the eyes
Lay bare my chest
Said do your best
To destroy me

See I've been to hell and back
So many times
I must admit
You kinda bore me

There's a lot of things
That can kill a man
There's a lot of ways
To die
Yes, and some already did
And walk beside me

There's a lot of things
I don't understand
Why so many people lie
It's the hurt I hide that fuels
The fire inside me

Will I always feel this way
So empty
So estranged?


Lyrics submitted by ewb, edited by superninjakitteh

Empty Lyrics as written by Ray Lamontagne

Lyrics © Hipgnosis Songs Group

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Empty song meanings
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43 Comments

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  • +4
    My Opinion

    I just wanted to say that while the meaning of a song's lyrics are usually relatively, left up for the person to decide, unless the writer says "This is the meaning...." This song makes me cry every time I hear it because when this song comes on, I just can't control my feelings and everything I keep bottled up for the day comes out when the music starts playing.

    For me, this song is all about depression. But, that's only because that is what I've dealt with since I was 12 years old. Since I was 18, I've felt this unexplainable emptiness inside of me. Like I've no purpose, no way to find out my purpose, that everything I do is pointless and without merit. I feel useless and destroyed, beaten down again and again. I feel unloved and completely alone, regardless of whether or not I scream at the top of my lungs everyone just pretends to not hear me.

    When he talks of making quiet love, to me that is the love you make when one or both partners are so completely depressed and beaten they don't even find a connection through making love. It is purely physical, with the two looking away from each other because they know they just need to feel something good once in a while, even if it is only through sex.

    I think the verse about demons is about suicide, or death. Telling all his troubles, his sadness and emptiness, to really go ahead and eat him alive. That he has suffered through it so much that he just doesn't care enough to fight it or try and stave it off. He just wants to quietly accept his death and embraces it, in fact he WANTS it to come. The hurt I hide just fuels the fires inside me that keep me on this self-destructive path of misery, loneliness, and, hopefully, death.

    NotThereYeton March 05, 2009   Link

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