My obsession with this song continues into Day 6. Every time I listen to it, it feels authentic, it feels as if Elton understands—which the song, on its merits, should not be capable of. Since a train ride last week, I have received some quasi-spiritual feeling listening to it.
I guess that’s why they call it the blues
Time on my hands could be time spent with you
Laughing like children, living like lovers
Rolling like thunder under the covers
And I guess that’s why they call it the blues
1. The song winds up as more than the sum of its parts. The lyrics aren’t moving on their own, but with the vocal delivery and the pounded piano, they become something moving.
2. “Laughing like children” and “rolling like thunder under the covers” each conjure an image, which makes “living like lovers” remarkably lazy by comparison. That line is repetitive and contributes nothing.
Time on my hands could be time spent with you
3. I like that, in this song, he depends on the girl. It reminds me of Lee Hazelwood’s “You Turned My Head Around,” in which the singer is failing out of life, and the girl clears out his head. It’s beautiful, that intentional codependence, a mutual support system. Time spent outside their system is wasted time!
Also the melody—and Elton’s delivery—fly into high gear in the “time” line. He gets to sounding pleading.
3b. This image of the man emotionally depending on the woman hits a sweet spot that you don’t see leveraged very often; in all TV and most movies, when a man depends on a woman, it is for primal needs like cooking or cleaning, because he is bumbleheaded. The sweeter, more emotional kind of dependence is mined in The Brown Bunny—despite the movie’s weird retrograde view of women—and especially on its poster:
Vulnerability, care. He is hunched and she is above him. She is active and he is passive. She is put-together, feathered hair and attentively rolled-up sleeves. If you stripped out all the corny, awful trappings of “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues”—like the doowop backing vocals—and distilled the song into one image, it would look close to this poster; at least that’s how I’m hearing it.
4. Different is the way Adam Sandler needs Emily Watson in Punch Drunk Love. Their relationship is haphazard. He needs someone but does not necessarily need Emily Watson; she just happened to be available. In the two songs and in The Brown Bunny, it’s clear enough that the women are not replaceable or interchangeable. The men need these particular women, not just any women.
