A band song, the chords written by the guitarist and bassist, the melody and words written by me. But that’s not important right now. What is important are the lines in the second verse:

‘Now I know that you say you’re right
But let me tell you,
I’ve seen fakers lie better
Than you could tell the truth.

I know what it’s like to be alone
And I’m not going back.’

Everything about those lyrics grates on me, right down to the ‘but let me tell you’. The most immediately annoying thing is obviously the naivety/authenticity issue. Some 15 year old moaning about how he has plumbed the depths of loneliness and despair doesn’t suggest the emotional impact of Juliette waking up to find Romeo dead beside her. Let’s also not forget that the singer sings these lines to someone he is clearly in a serious relationship with now. So the loneliness could be assumed to have happened 2/3 years earlier. The memory he is alluding to might well have been when he lost his mum in the supermarket for ten minutes and was trapped in a dark forest of striding strangers’ legs.

But maybe you’re a postmodern reader and you subscribe to the Death of the Author. Maybe you don’t think the age of the writer makes any difference – it’s the words themselves that matter. Well, I mean first up, there isn’t really anything poetic about those lines is there? But no matter, lyrics don’t have to be abstract or complex, or even rhyme. Take Lorraine Ellison’s chorus:

‘Stay with me baby
Please stay with me baby
Oh, stay with me baby
I can’t go on’

These lyrics make up one of the most powerful choruses of all time, because the music and the vocal performance lifts them. This is the difference between lyrics and poetry – music has the ability to transform phrases we might class as cliché into powerful, profound statements. But I’m not fully, or even at all, convinced that the musical performance of my lyrics in ‘You’re Not Alone’ has done anything except make them just slightly worse.

Then there’s a predictable consistency issue, as with pretty much every song I’ve written about so far. On first listen, it’s easy to be fooled into thinking that ‘You’re Not Alone’ contains a series of well-matched verses that all relate to a central, consolatory message.

In fact, listen again (if you can manage it), and you’ll find that there are three distinct shades to the ‘You’re Not Alone’ message, none of which makes sense together.

1. (a) Your basic, ‘you’re not alone, I’m here with you’ message. This narrative arc features the song’s best line: ‘Turn the light on inside, you can’t see in the dark’, and it’s basically what you think the song is about if you aren’t concentrating, mainly because of its title.

(b) But even within this first narrative, there is a second strain which succinctly discredits part 1 with a couple of choice phrases:

‘I know that you aren’t used
To this kind of advice
From someone on the street’

Actually coming in the first verse, those lines tell us that the singer is a stranger to the addressee of the song, which is completely at odds with the tone of the rest of the lyrics, in particular with narrative 2:

2. These are the lyrics quoted at the top of this post. They essentially read ‘You are lying. Please don’t leave me.’ Suddenly the situation is reversed in two ways: the characters do know each other very well, and it’s actually the singer who might be alone.

3. Finally, we have a resigned message about consolatory messages in general.

‘Well you’re not what you wanted to be,
But let’s just leave that all behind.
When there’s nothing left to shout for,
People tell you: ‘At least you’ve got your health’

So, it’s a song about a person consoling someone else or being consoled or being dumped or not liking being consoled or consoling in the first place.

We in the band liked this song a lot, once upon a time. We never played it live much because we thought it was too slow/ we couldn’t play it very well. But we’d show it to people. ‘Listen to this, what do you think? It’s a song we wrote about taxis and leading a healthy lifestyle’