Ghosts

Probably the saddest song ever written. I think it's a song about disappointment. Sitting alone, in the dark, reflecting on the choices you've made and the way your life has turned out because of them. Thinking hard about how life hasn't lived up to your youthful expectations and aspirations and wondering what things would be like if you had chosen a different path.

This song makes me think of some of the older people I've encountered. Their adult children have moved far away, and contact is infrequent. It's something we might not think of as a big deal, but two or three generations ago, it was a big shift. Add to that: decades ago they bought houses in safe neighborhoods and raised their children their; now, decades later, their neighborhoods are dangerous slums. They're afraid to even walk out into their own yards, or to their cars in their own driveways, and they can't afford to move. But worst of all, they're alone all the time.

A brilliant song. Not the easiest of Newman's to love, or to "get" the first time, but what seems at first fragmentary, in both the words and the music, ultimately reveals itself as beyond improvement. It isn't easy to do as much as he does here. The words and the music and the singing all together bring this lonely, ruminative, frightened old World War I vet into sharp focus.

I like to imagine it's the same character from Newman's "Going Home (1918)," who 60 years earlier was singing about returning to "the land I love, and the one girl who waits for me."