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."
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."