If You Have To Go Away

A woman's life unfolds across two verses of this song, and the same refrain keeps returning to her lips. As a girl she stared into her coffee, dreaming of being loved and written poetry to; her mother's warning that a man might wander far turns out to be truer than she wanted. In the second verse she is older, sitting at home with their child, listening to the radio while some singer praises his wife, and the old warning circles back — stay with me more than you stay with that guitar. What makes the song tender rather than bitter is the way she keeps letting him leave. She promises to wait by the phone, to put his records on and pretend he is still home, to leave his shoes beside the bed, to be with herself instead of only with him. The closing vow — loving him till it is cold in hell — is stubborn, almost wry, and the imagined call on a static line answers it with reassurance. The song holds absence and devotion in the same hand, without pretending the waiting is easy.