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Three Bitter Songs
A Rate A Record wrath-o-rama to prepare you for February 14
The Kinks, “Where Did My Spring Go?”
Unlike his British Invasion counterparts, Ray Davies tends to write songs that are more sad than happy and more dark than sad. “Where Did My Spring Go” is probably the most despairing and angry of his bleakest works.
Like the other two songs in this challenge, it’s a story song, with a dramatized persona who doesn’t necessarily speak for the writer. The speaker here is somewhat older than Davies was (29) when the album was “released” in 1973, and rails against old age and the woman who he feels has stolen his youth. The anticlimactic last line captures the sheer nothingness that has engulfed this bitter man forever.
Porter Wagoner, “The Cold Hard Facts of Life”
Murder ballads are to country music what drug trips are to psychedelia. Porter Wagoner has covered several of these chronicles of violence, most notably the title track “The Cold Hard Facts of Life,” from an album with one of the greatest cover photographs…
