Schinckel.net

With no radio in the car at the moment (I broke the automatic aerial again, and it’s too expensive to justify buying a new one just yet), we tend to put 6 CDs in the stacker, and listen away. At the moment, we have:

• Diesel • Short Cool Ones
• Sheryl Crow • Tuesday Night Music Club
• Coldplay • Parachutes
• Diesel • Solid State Rhyme
• Frank Bennett • Five O’Clock Shadow
• Dido • No Angel

I know, I know, it’s a pretty Early 90s set of discs, but, hey… Now, the interesting thing is that we are sick of Frank Bennett already - he did a couple of albums that are covers of modern songs, in a Lounge/Swing style. We must have listened to them too much when we first bought the CDs! The big surprise for me was just how much I love Sheryl Crow.

I remember her being big with Tuesday Night Music Club back when I first started Uni (1993), and I still knew most of the words to most of the songs upon first listen. I tend to over-analyse song lyrics, after listening to too much Paul Kelly and Ben Folds, and people of that ilk, who really pack a lot of meaning into their songs, so this may be a bit over the top, but there’s one aspect of one of Sheryl Crow’s songs that made me look at the whole song a different way.

No One Said It Would Be Easy by Sheryl Crow, from the album Tuesday Night Music Club (1993):

It’s obvious the trouble we’re in,
When your father pulls up in a Mercedes Benz.
He says he just happened to be in the neighbourhood.
But before he leaves he slips the Landlord the rent.
You say, “It’s just a question of eliminating obstacles.”
As you throw your dinner out the kitchen door,
You say, “I know how you try,”
“But honey, let’s eat out tonight.”

[Chorus]: No one said it would be easy,
But no one said it’d be this hard.
No one said it would be easy,
No one thought we’d come this far.

You can’t seem to ever fold up a shirt.
I bring it up and you think I’m a jerk.
But I think we’re here to stay,
I can’t imagine it any other way.

[Chorus]

Sometimes I wonder who he’s picturing,
When he looks at me and smiles.

[Chorus]

Oh, and look we’ve come this far.

Without being too anal and looking at the whole song, I’m just going to talk about the chorus. Pretty straightforward:

No one said it would be easy, But no one said it’d be this hard. No one said it would be easy, No one thought we’d come this far.

I originally (probably correctly) thought that the last line had the meaning of:

No one thought we would come this far.

But think about the song, and how the meaning changes if you instead think about it as:

No one thought we had come this far.

Suddenly, the song changes meaning. In some ways, it makes more sense. Instead of it being a statement that “We’ve done better than anyone thought we would,” it becomes “We’ve come too far to quit: no one else thought we were as deep into this relationship as we are. It’s too late to get out now, not without losing too much.” And the final line:

Oh, and look we’ve come this far.