"Beside Myself" is a lament. The setting is definitively India ("streets of Bombay"), but the situation could be anywhere where poor people have to struggle everyday to survive. The method of survival here is prostitution, as is implied by "I saw you taking money in the shadows" and "Strip off that work paint (makeup), put on a cleaner face." The purveyors are underage ("Small child messing down") and male ("Big sister can you hear him/Big sister can you see him cry").
But the song is really about the narrator who sees these things, knows that they are wrong, feels powerless to do anything about them, and wonders if he even should ("Cities like this have no shame, indeed why should they?"). That contradiction, evils that persist because that is how the most desperate of us survive and that is the way it has always been, causes the narrator to be "beside himself" with anger that can find no release ("Between the guilt and charity, I feel the wimp inside of me").
Musically, I would rate "Beside Myself" up there with the very best of Jethro Tull's songs. Its melody is complex and varied: light when it's required, heavy when it wants to be. It rocks as no other song on "Roots to Branches" does.
"Beside Myself" is a lament. The setting is definitively India ("streets of Bombay"), but the situation could be anywhere where poor people have to struggle everyday to survive. The method of survival here is prostitution, as is implied by "I saw you taking money in the shadows" and "Strip off that work paint (makeup), put on a cleaner face." The purveyors are underage ("Small child messing down") and male ("Big sister can you hear him/Big sister can you see him cry").
But the song is really about the narrator who sees these things, knows that they are wrong, feels powerless to do anything about them, and wonders if he even should ("Cities like this have no shame, indeed why should they?"). That contradiction, evils that persist because that is how the most desperate of us survive and that is the way it has always been, causes the narrator to be "beside himself" with anger that can find no release ("Between the guilt and charity, I feel the wimp inside of me").
Musically, I would rate "Beside Myself" up there with the very best of Jethro Tull's songs. Its melody is complex and varied: light when it's required, heavy when it wants to be. It rocks as no other song on "Roots to Branches" does.