True Love

Im sorry but this is the saddest song ever. I heard a live bootleg of the earlier version of this song and even elliott sounds like he is crying.

elliott doesn't necessarily write about drugs, just uses them as a vehicle to convey other ideas about relationships, more specifically poisonous/harmful relationships with other people and himself.

i know i am the last person to comment here but i am listening to this song again now and fucking hell......it is phenomenal!!! jesus, how did he manage to get make his songs so sad and beautiful at the same time? this is sooooooooo good..........RIP

i think this about a woman and drugs and how loosing his true love made him become more involved and dependant on drugs as they became his "true Love"

its bona fide poetry. Elliott never glamourised addiction, he knows and yearns for what 'true love' should be, but it has forever been completely elusive to him, So instead he finds it in a drug which he bought off the street. At first,like any relationship , its pure bliss, but then when the (post honeymoon-)honeymoon masks come off, the true nature of this so called true love is revealed , she is controlling, possessive, abusive and manipulative. So he feebly attempts to end it, but she cunningly lures him back by telling him he needs cigarettes because she knows he will make a detour to go find her, and so he does, and whats worse to find that she's grown even stronger, he now accepts that this is bigger than him and can't do this alone, so he goes to rehab, where he finds himself playing the same sort of tricks he learned from her, only here on the doctors so he can get stronger drugs. In his numbness, he astutely observes, that there are others just like him, and it wasn't 'just me' after all, deprived of this beautiful elusive thing true love('the rose behind glass locked and closed') Sadly this is a mere observation and is in no way comforting to him, so he cries out to his maker (its lord not love btw) to take him away. a swan song indeed, RIP you beautiful tragic soul

Elliott had this to say about 'True Love' from his last interview: "True Love is a lyric driven song. This is the oldest one that we've heard so far. This is from that record I was going to throw away. I still might. Those weren't very happy days. It was a long time ago at this point."

This song to me is about Elliott Smiths search for love. The idea that the only love he can reach is that of drugs. Its the only love that doesn't leave him. Until all the drugs he used made him ill "One day I got sick, She played me a nasty old trick" So he takes leaves his true love, drugs, although they were his lover, he found it hard to live without them. "My love had gotten too strong" So at the end, he has no true love and is drugged up by doctors who just treat him like all the others. He just wants to go someone where he belongs, perhaps the afterlife.

God rest Elliott smiths sole. Lets hope he's home now.

Lyrics change all the time. He changed verses and words when he sang it live.

I'm surprised nobody else came up with this, but the opening line could be a reference to those little glass tubes with fake roses in them that are sold in convenience stores and used as crack pipes. Not that thats necessarily what he intended, it just makes me think of those, and it kinda fits.

Also Elliott Smith was a fan of Neil Young, who has a song called "Love is a Rose".

Oh god this song. "All I need is a safe place to bleed..."

It's obviously, and heartbreakingly, about drug addiction, in my opinion. And I love that he can portray the bleakness of rehab in so few lines. "Puke it up so the doctor can write me a new prescription" -- the physical discomfort of the actual treatment, "Tranquil as a dove, people that have lost their true love" -- the isolation of feeling lost and being surrounded by equally lost people.

And I agree with cheetohman. The last part is clearly:

Take me up my lord Take me up today Take me out of this place Take me up with you today.

Which could be interpreted as a plea to god for death, or could be interpreted as a plea to the "heavenly bodies above" to "take me up" (let him get high). I suspect it's meant to be both, anything to "take [him] out of this place."