I always tell people the same thing when recommending Beth Orton: "Approach with caution." She sets a mood and you hear things that make you listen more closely. And you get pulled in. Her music is truthful, and some truth is uncomfortable. She expresses things that we have felt but may never have faced, and she expresses them simply, beautifully, and with complete candor.
This song is no different. Whether she wrote it or Ted Barnes did, it's pure Beth. For me, the song evokes a bright flash of memory, a perfect moment ("beat a drum to decide on a sketch or design"), followed by a long, dark period of longing, the willingness to self-abasement (I come down to your knees) to hear the words that you most want to hear or hear yourself say and have affirmed, the wishful thinking of a chance encounter that affirms that the other, the "sum of it all," never forgot you either ("beat a path to my side, a sketch for design" and "Can you see the light of bare winter night?"). There's bargaining: "I could be your honey | And let it go, there you go."
There's jealousy in this song too. The implication of the second stanza is that the other is bedazzled by another ("Wipe out the sun from your eyes | That vicious sky," juxtaposed with the "bare winter night"), that the speaker doesn't believe that the other is happy with that person ("'cause some sleep to lie;" have any of you ever pretended to be asleep?), and that the speaker "See[s] the way you are, feel[s] the way you move," i.e. knows the truth of the person that his or her partner doesn't.
The gamut of darkness that we live through to recapture that flash is completed by the speaker's admission to having sought out the same kind of person: "Since I first met you I found the love I lost | It's just like you, looks just like you."
Beth brings tremendous narrative power and sensitivity to her craft. She bears a careful -and sensitive- listen. But... approach with caution; you might get a bruise or two (reference to another particularly powerful song of hers). This song's a gem.
I always tell people the same thing when recommending Beth Orton: "Approach with caution." She sets a mood and you hear things that make you listen more closely. And you get pulled in. Her music is truthful, and some truth is uncomfortable. She expresses things that we have felt but may never have faced, and she expresses them simply, beautifully, and with complete candor.
This song is no different. Whether she wrote it or Ted Barnes did, it's pure Beth. For me, the song evokes a bright flash of memory, a perfect moment ("beat a drum to decide on a sketch or design"), followed by a long, dark period of longing, the willingness to self-abasement (I come down to your knees) to hear the words that you most want to hear or hear yourself say and have affirmed, the wishful thinking of a chance encounter that affirms that the other, the "sum of it all," never forgot you either ("beat a path to my side, a sketch for design" and "Can you see the light of bare winter night?"). There's bargaining: "I could be your honey | And let it go, there you go."
There's jealousy in this song too. The implication of the second stanza is that the other is bedazzled by another ("Wipe out the sun from your eyes | That vicious sky," juxtaposed with the "bare winter night"), that the speaker doesn't believe that the other is happy with that person ("'cause some sleep to lie;" have any of you ever pretended to be asleep?), and that the speaker "See[s] the way you are, feel[s] the way you move," i.e. knows the truth of the person that his or her partner doesn't.
The gamut of darkness that we live through to recapture that flash is completed by the speaker's admission to having sought out the same kind of person: "Since I first met you I found the love I lost | It's just like you, looks just like you."
Beth brings tremendous narrative power and sensitivity to her craft. She bears a careful -and sensitive- listen. But... approach with caution; you might get a bruise or two (reference to another particularly powerful song of hers). This song's a gem.