Wait So Long

In my experience, most men interpret this song as the lament of a man in the friend zone of a woman he loves. I'm a woman, so perhaps I can offer a different perspective. That's not the way I hear it at all. Perhaps it's just what was going on in my life when I first heard this song, but I always interpreted it as a song about a relationship where the woman is kind of mentally unstable, or maybe just sort of wild and emotionally needy, and the man is making the better choice by choosing not to be with her, even though he likes her and wants to help her.

"I could never pretend that I don't love you / You could never pretend that I'm your man"

Clearly he cares about her, but,

"That's exactly the way that I want it / That's exactly the way that I am"

This guy is a player. He enjoys the romantic attention he gets from her, and he knows he can't reciprocate, yet he continues to sort of lead her on. I say "sort of" because she seems to realize that he doesn't like her as more than a friend (and you can kind of sense that general tension in their relationship based on the lyrics) yet she still holds onto hope while dating men who don't treat her all that well.

"And you call me in the morning with your troubles / Takin' it downtown every night / I could never place the stars at night above ya / I got my hands on the ground, and you know I'm right."

She needs a lot from this guy emotionally. She calls him to complain or to get things off her chest, maybe just in general lament about her existential angst. He's saying that he's not the answer to her problems, and he doesn't have the answers, and they both know that this relationship is not healthy yet he can't say no to her, because he does care about her, and she can't stop going to him because she loves him.

Honestly I've had a relationship exactly like this one.

"It's a coffee stained earth ever time it happens / Liven up honey it ain't that bad"

He's saying that she kind of keeps herself in a mindframe such that she is always depressed, or maybe overdramatic, or perhaps is self-destructive or self-sabotaging in her relationships or even just her thoughts.

"Any afterthought rose to recognition / Like every other coffin that I had"

She knows she's this way but she can't stop, and she knows she won't find her answers in a man, but she keeps trying. The narrator is sort of equally pitiful and disgusted by her behavior.

"And your buick broke down in Winnemucca / Fall to your knees and you pray to the lord / Then you take up hope at the politicians / Nothing happens in this burnt out town anymore."

She keeps trying all these things to fix her life, keeps trying to find things to blame for her rut, but she doesn't realize her self-destruction. She keeps narrowly missing these moments of clarity, like when her car breaks down, or when she wonders if perhaps it's the small town she lives in that's keeping her down.

"And your heart rolls on like a frozen freight train / You know that I help you if I can"

Pretty simple. She keeps putting her whole heart into new relationships or crushes every time they come along, thinking that this will be the one that changes it all. The narrator just sort of sits back and lets her implode time and time again but tries not to get too involved, helping her whenever she comes to him.

"But I'm just a raindrop in a river / Just a little itty-bitty grain of sand"

Just one more guy in her river/beach of guys. Just one more person whom she relies on for her emotional support. He feels that he's not all that special to her, and maybe she's the one using him for attention, and not the other way around.

"And you know that I'm doomed to repeat this / With all the bad habits that I've learned / But it's better than your fire-borne fornication / And all the dirty money that you earn"

He's made some bad habits in his relationship with her, and he's wondering how long it will affect him, or if his future relationships will be trustworthy because he's spent so much time in this dysfunctional semi-relationship. He's glad he's not as dysfunctional as her, though, and he sort of uses her life as a remedy to his own insecurity about love. Like, "someone's always having a worse day than you" sort of thing. He also appears to now be having some moral problems with their relationship.

I think this song is a lot more complex than the simple "friend zone" or "in love with a prostitute" story. But perhaps I'm reading too much into it.

The End