Yes! Completely agreed with both of you... this is the best bit of the song, to me. I also agree with this; and it brings me to this point - interestingly there are hints in these lyrics at something Neil mentions in that Hot Press interview - that when he was in love around this time, the relationship was maybe not that physical. Having read the interview again this morning and then listened to the song, both "don't you ever in your dreams / take a lover and make her scream?" and "If I were you / I'd make the break / before I take my frustrations out on you..." both reminded me of this quote in the interview: HOWEVER, we know that these lyrics were written in 1994, so perhaps it's just a coincidence.
If I Were You (I’d Be Through With Me) Another one that is just ok for me. More musically interesting than If though so 3/5.
If I Were You (I’d Be Through With Me) I like this song. I like the falsetto piece. I like how the tension builds up when Neil sings "Don't you ever wonder why" and then is released in a sweeping, pastoral arrangement where you almost see hills and valleys and green, green grass in front of you. I like how the orchestra grows in strength towards the end when Neil sings for the last time about "stupid sheep" and grass that is succulent. What is the piece really about the newspapers he reads? Feels like a little connection to "How Can You Leave Me On My Own" and the line about watching naked ladies. Or have I misunderstood the text here? The above text is automatically translated with Google Translate because I am very tired. Edit: forgot the rating! I’ll give it a 4/5.
If I Were You Far better than the last track and another great orchestral arrangement and fine vocal. I don't know if I will get through what the Flan has to say about the lyrics and there are so many ways to interpret them. A sort of anti-love song. I get the sense that some time was spent on the lyrics as opposed to some of the other tracks on the album. I love the transition from verse to chorus with the orchestra swelling up behind the vocal and the falsetto section and instrumental section in the second half of the song. The piano provides a lightness of touch which lets the song breathe after the album seemed to be getting very dense. I have listened to this quite a few times today and it gets better each time. 4.4/5
When we started this runthrough, I think I said that there were 3 songs on this album that I loved, 3 I thought were okay, and 1 I really didn't like. As I listen to it more and more, this is changing slightly - and today's song is definitely one that's going up in my estimation. It's a more upbeat track inbetween 3 slower/ less energetic ones so that definitely endears it to me, but overall it's just a good fun number with a nice melody, more great orchestration, and lyrics which have fewer cringey moments than some of this album. It's a 4.5 from me. Why not a 5? I'm not a big fan of hearing anyone repeatedly sing "suck-yoo-lent"
I’m glad you could decipher the poor Google translation! I would also like to take this opportunity the change my 4/5 to 4.5/5. There’s no point in holding back, is there? Note to self: Idea for a new thread — ”Is Neil Hannon a self-confessed porn addict? Discuss!”
As some of you have already found out, the lyrics can be a bit confusing this time. So it won't be easy trying to follow The Flan in the High Castle trying to make sense of them, but given this challenging task I think he's aquitted himself well: Over on the B-side, the fifth track, “If I Were You (I’d Be Through With Me)”, finds itself in the curious position of having to continue Short Album after the nightmare crescendo of its midpoint. Since this is not actually a horror album, Hannon goes for the obvious solution: breaking the tension with something light and pleasant. “If I Were You” returns to the lounge-song sound that characterised the first half of “Someone”, and features a similarly self-conscious and insecure narrator. And, like “Someone”, it’s about finding oneself in a situation that seems too good to be true: “If I were you / I’d look at me / And fail to see / The things I see in you”. If the first four songs were all about the initial stages of relationships – about finding someone, and proving or one’s [sic] demonstrating love – then this track is about something slightly more adult: the fear that a stable relationship will collapse. It seems the narrator has reason to feel unworthy, as he admits – without yet mentioning any details – that he hasn’t been treating her well: “And if I were you / I wouldn’t let / The **** you get from me / Get the better of you”. Hannon takes his characteristic self-deprecating tone and turns it up to a parodic degree, with a narrator who actively, repeatedly disparages himself, tempting fate, practically inviting his girlfriend to abandon him. “Don’t you ever wonder why / I could never make you cry?” sings Hannon, before soaring into the chorus: “Well, if I were you / I’d ride away to / A pasture new / Where I could graze on / The grass so succulent and sweet / If I were you / I’d be through with me”. Yes, reader: this is another song about a lovely horse. Now, granted the word “horse” isn’t actually used here; and the song later mentions being among a flock of sheep, which might give the listener a more ovine impression. However, the term “ride” confirms that this daydream is about being a riding animal, even if it doesn’t involve a rider in the conventional sense, and a horse is the most plausible possibility. If I didn’t know the chronology of Hannon’s discography, I might think the entre Short Album project was just a particularly extravagant effort to raise money for My Lovely Horse Rescue. However, Hannon wrote “If I Were You” in 1994, on the way back from a festival in Edinburgh, so any lyrical resonances with “My Lovely Horse” are probably coincidental (unless they were added in rewrites). The song hinges on what’s known as a pataphor – a figure of speech that transcends metaphor to the same extent that metaphors transcend the literal, drifting off into its own self-sustaining fantasy world. The narrator attempts to empathise with his partner, but gets so swept away in his own dream of her escaping him that his attempts to articulate himself verbally simply break down. As the lyrics lose focus, the task of carrying the momentum of their meaning falls upon the performance and the music. Despite a bombastic chorus, the song maintains a relaxed tone throughout, buoyed up by a soft piano melody and güiro flourishes; the recurring phrase “I’d be through with me” is always delivered softly, keeping the song’s momentum in check and its attitude gentle. The narrator never fully articulates the reasons behind his insecurity, but wryly provides us with a smattering of trivial details: “If I were you / I wouldn’t need / To always read / The magazines that I do / They make me blue”. It’s enough to give us a sense that this is no grand or tragic melodrama, but something more mundane, probably rooted in the same little problems and frustrations that characterise all relationships. The narrator has allowed these things to fester in his mind, and would rather end things entirely than face the relationship’s problems: “So if I were you / I’d make the break / Before I take / My frustrations out on you / Just break on through”. Leading in to the next instance of the chorus, Hannon sings the song’s most fascinating line: “Don’t you ever, in your dreams / Take a lover and make her scream?” After all that prevarication, it becomes vividly clear that the conflict at the heart of the song is ultimately a sexual one. We now see that the first verse’s ambiguous “I could never make you cry” referred to a cry of pleasure, not of emotion. It seems that the narrator has been unfaithful to his partner, but his muddled, desperate attempt to make her understand involves asking her to imagine being him. “If I Were You” is a song about empathy, but it’s an empathy that ultimately turns out to be self-regarding and self-serving: the narrator struggles to put himself in his partner’s place, but only so that he can get a better look at himself, and justify asking her to empathise with him in turn. After some ethereal non-lexical singing in the orchestral bridge, Hannon reprises the chorus, newly emphatic and assured: “I’d live real fast / And die real young / You see, if I were you / I’d end my days / In a field of stupid sheep / Just grazing the grass so succulent and sweet / If I were you / I’d be through with me”. In this tumble of ideas and metaphors, it’s easy to miss just how strange this song is: the narrator is literally fantasising about being his girlfriend while she becomes a horse so that she can dump himself and die after a lifetime eating grass. (Reminds me of a DeviantArt painting I thought I’d repressed from my memory.) The reference to the stupidity of the sheep is particularly telling: it’s as if the narrator, uncomfortable with expressing his emotional needs and acknowledging his own faults, has found himself instinctively heaping sillier wishes and images on in order to obscure them. The more he trips over his own words and mixes his metaphors, the clearer we see just how earnest he is. While it’s quick, the narrator’s wish to “live real fast and die real young” (albeit, ahem, in the form of his horse ex-girlfriend) also connects to the exuberant death-wish of “In Pursuit of Happiness”, where the narrator considers his physical world an infertile territory, something to be escaped and left behind. After the derangement of “If…”, whose narrator had no sense of his own horrific flaws, we get a song that consists entirely of introspection and self-critique. Despite being tonal opposites, “If…” and “If I Were You” are closely related. Granted, the decision to place two songs with such similar titles back-to-back is a little confusing – especially when both involve elaborate fantasies in which the narrator gallops across fields astride, or as, his partner, who in each case has become a horse. All of this serves, however, to emphasise the extent to which the latter is the necessary answer and remedy to the former. After trying out a long list of increasingly wrong wishes and thought-experiments, Hannon finally arrives at the correct one, which is simple empathy: “If… I Were You”. I think the Flan contradicts himself here as he already came to the conclusion that the song isn't about simple empathy but an empathy that ultimately turns out to be self-regarding and self-serving: the narrator struggles to put himself in his partner’s place, but only so that he can get a better look at himself, and justify asking her to empathise with him in turn.
And it won't be the last time either. And a dog will show up again as well. Actually, I think Neil could have trusted his initial instinct to save "The Dogs & The Horses" for a later album because it would make a fitting end to this one. As an added bonus, "Theme From Casanova" would actually be in the place it claims to be in.
I like how nobody has pointed out yet that this isn’t a solo piano rendition, it’s a solo guitar rendition. I really like this version too- the song is fully formed, but it’s much more tentatively performed. Neil still has his “Promenade” voice so it gives a different feel - whereas there’s almost an arrogant “you might as well dump me” swagger to the final version, this one is more of a meek “you’re probably going to leave me, aren’t you?” performance.
I agree, Theme would have made a great and natural ending for Casanova and The Dogs and The Horses would sit well musically on ASAAL making it not as short.
Trust the man to confound people by having two songs starting with "If" next to each other. If.... 3.8 Sing a song of dogs (yeah, another one). Nothing wrong with this, fits well into the album overall but lacks a bit of variety to push it into higher echelons and has that strange kind of suspended, anti-climactic ending. If I Were You 4.6 It's almost as if the previous song was a dress rehearsal for this one. It has more or less the same aural elements but this one has a bridge AND a killer chorus which makes it soar effortlessly above its rival. The dogs are replaced by "stupid sheep", again that displacement. "Let's write a very romantic sounding song but let's put 'stupid sheep' in the chorus and fantasise about chewing grass. But of course there is a further displacement here, all the daft things are not performed by the narrator but suggested by him to his paramour. Hmm... it's a groovy kind of love.
Huh, the DVD order again! This interview published 5 February 1997, not clear when it was conducted, but... here's a promo cassette with the same order! So the track listing must have been switched fairly late. I have the same problem with this album - If..., If I Were You and I'm All You Need seem to be stuck together somehow, presumably through the Is (not In Pursuit... though). As the Black Session has cry / scream, I guess this was Neil screwing up at the gig.
Love this one, I agree with so many comments here. The arrangement's really good, isn't it? Not flashy like In Pursuit, but just right - the staccato melodies, the string shimmers, the percussion, the dynamics, the trumpet solo... ooh, it's lovely. Really like the lyric too, maybe because doing the worst to yourself so nobody else can hurt you is a strategy not unfamiliar to me. And it's pushed just far enough to make us question it, while still feeling it. Despite their clear tonal differences, I'm struck again by the shared skeleton this album has with Casanova. Even on an album about love rather than sex, the singer is almost entirely concerned with how love feels for him, whether it would be a good idea for him to be in love, whether it would make him happy or not, whether he could love or be loved. There's no song expressing actual love for another person, outside the formal exercise of Everybody Knows - nothing that describes another real person with love, in the way that's common to Joni Mitchell's love songs, or Leonard Cohen's, or Laura Nyro's, or (oh yeah) Scott Walker's. When do we get songs like that with The Divine Comedy? Certainly on Foreverland, but... only a few before then, aren't there? (First tenuous & gratuitous Ben Folds link! Emaline, another lovely song that might be about a horse...) 4.5/5
Excellent point! I’d argue there is at least one on Absent Friends... but it’s about his daughter rather than his wife.
I find "If I Were You" and our next track, "Timewatching," to be linked in theme; both are basically saying "here's why it's not going to work out between us." I like the metaphor in the chorus, of riding to pastures new, where presumably one is indulging in the "quest for pleasure," as mentioned in "Timewatching." "If I Were You" feels like a song of sexual incompatibility rather than emotional, given the lead ins to the chorus, and the second verse, and the finale about living fast in "virgin country." This character sees the pointlessness of it all the same, calling his future partners "stupid sheep," of which he is one too, never mind the reducing his future pleasures to mere grazing on grass - it's just thoughtless feeding of appetite, without love. "If I Were You" then: 4.5/5
This one gets a 3.5/5 from me, I reckon - don't have much to say otherwise. I'd be inclined to suggest there are *two* on Victory, for that matter - one filial and one romantic - and at least two on Knighthood.
If I Were You is a 5/5 song I really, really like. What a great arrangement (the best one so far in this catalogue?). Excellent vocals on the 'stupid sheep' section. It's yet another song on this album with a lyrical joke at its heart, flipping perspective mid sentence. That gives us the hat trick! 'Everybody knows except you'; 'someone I once knew told someone like me'; 'if I were you I'd be through with me'. It would seem like a repetitive device if I didn't love it so much - it's used effectively in popular music since time immemorial (two contrasting examples off the top of my head - Gershwin's "I am just a little girl / Who's looking for a little boy / Who's looking for a girl to love" and Tom Petty's "I hope you never fall in love / with somebody like you"). Belated rating on 'If...': it's stately and effective, with a tune I always like to hear but struggle to remember. When I first listened through The Divine Comedy's discography the line ‘cos trees don’t cry’ is one that really jumped out at me. A great and effective off-hand sort of joke that Hannon is very good at slipping into songs (same structure as 'except maybe some wood'). It's the turning point in the song, lifting it from allegedly-sincere to melodramatic, which builds right through to the end. 4/5.
"If I Were You"... I'd have awarded "If I Were You (I'd Be Through With Me) 70.95 points from 17 votes, for a preliminary total of: 4.17
Today's song is: Timewatching The third, YES THIRD time this song appears on a Divine Comedy release (after the jangle-pop version on 1991's "Timewatch" EP and the string quartet rearrangement for "Liberation" in 1993.) This is therefore the 3rd time we are awarding this song points, so it will be interesting to see if there's much change this time around. Some bits from Neil from the 1997 Hot Press interview - which is a little bit about the song, and a bit more about the relationship which had just broken down around the time the album came out. A small bit of extra info from ashortsite: On the Liberation version, the last verse starts almost in the same manner as the first one ("it could be forever"), whereas in A Short Album About Love, in the last verse Neil says "it will be forever" as in 'Timewatch'.
Wait, the album continues after "If I Were You"? Timewatching A decent version of a not very good song. 2/5
Yes, I meant to say that it would not only fit lyrically but also musically. There's the orchestral arrangement, of course, but it also features the güiro just like "Someone" and "If I Were You". Good observation. I noticed the guitar as soon as I hit play, but I didn't want to get anal about it by pointing it out. Once again, I think Neil's initial instinct was right. This juxtaposition works really well, especially if you listen to the lyrics at the end of the first song and the beginning of the second: If I were you I'd be through with me. But don't look a horse in the mouth. But the late sequencing change isn't a problem for me because "Timewatching" has been excised from my personal tracklist anyway. I think musically "If I Were You (I'd Be Through With Me)" is my least favourite on the album so far, but it still gets 4/5. The verse melody is a bit pedestrian, and the first verse suffers from having too many lines ending in "you". Also, the chorus sometimes is a bit too over the top when he goes into full crooning mode. The musical highlight for me is the beautiful trumpet solo.
