Tuesday, May 13, 2025

"Nine Times Blue"

When I listened to the super deluxe edition of Headquarters about a year ago, I felt that there was something significant in the structure of one of the verses in "Nine Times Blue" (which I know only via the demo version):
I know that never in the world
Could I have found me such a girl
Who's there pick me up before I fall
And if in the end we should go
Both our separate ways, I know
The lessons I've learned here is worth it all
I couldn't quite figure it out at the time, but recently, I ran across my note again and finally realized what it is.  Syntactically, it's odd that "we" and "both" in the clause "we should go both our separate ways" aren't together (normally, it would be "we both should go..." or even "we should both go..."), but the distance between the words matches the meaning of the lyrics.  Since the line break falls between them, there's an even greater sense of this separation.