All I Really Need to Know I Learned from John Hiatt Lyrics

Listen up, all you womenfolk! Do you want to understand what drives the human male? Do you wish to comprehend the vastness of his emptiness and grok his strange ways? Do you just maybe want to know what's eating him? Then look no further than the works of The Man himself: Mr. John Hiatt, whose song lyrics explain it all.

Now, women, it's nice when you love us, but after a certain point we become perplexed (and even begin to resent you) at your seeming failure to understand what a bastard we actually are. (Actually, what we don't usually realize is that you knew it all along, but can't act upon the knowledge because of some female-specific constitutional defect that remains a mystery to us.) Anyway, The Man explains it in "Angel Eyes":

So tonight I'll ask the stars above
How did I ever win your love?
What did I do, what did I say
To turn your angel eyes my way?

There's no answer. Or if there is, the guy in the song sure doesn't find it. He's asking rhetorical-like questions, see. (Hiatt even has a song called "She Loves the Jerk.")

The flip side of the "What the hell are you doing with me?" theme is "I swear I'll always love you and be faithful, and by 'swear' I mean I'm gonna try." Women and men are from the same planet, but words can mean different things to them. The Man sums it up in "Cross My Fingers":

Baby when I put my mind to it
I slip into another gear
And I travel in another syncopation
When all I wanna be is here with you, and
I'll be true to you - cross my fingers
I'll be good to you - cross my fingers

See? He's trying his best, which is all he can do. Often it's a futile effort, as in "Little Head":

I'm loyal as a dog but I'm a hog for that sexual attraction
It starts up in my mind and makes a bee line below the belt
No consequences just satisfaction
Baby in my heart I'm faithful
This two headed monster is so distasteful
Forgive me when my instincts start stinkin'
I'm just so easily led when the little head does the thinkin'

Even you probably realize that when it gets right down to it, what makes you dig a guy isn't his little head so much as his brain - expressed, usually, through his words. So who better than a master songwriter-dude to lay all this out so that even your confused female minds can understand it? In "Loving a Hurricane" The Man casts a cold clear eye on the process of courtship, and you'd do well to take note:

You [the man] answer questions like a natural disaster
Voices in the wind - you let 'em call her out
The whole foundation just went flying right past her
She puts her heart into it - and you just yank it out
You pulled her love out through the window pane
That's what she gets for loving a hurricane

Let's look closely at that. The song's very first line establishes the importance of language in the process of love. "Answer[ing] questions like a natural disaster," he's using the power of his words to overwhelm her, to take away her sense of control over life - just as happens when nature rises up against us, except this is a form of surrender which she may like and encourage. The "voices in the wind" are the poetic tradition, which he draws upon to whip away her whole foundation, to "call her out" and "pull her love out."

Article Author: Jon Sobel

Jon Sobel is Co-Executive Editor of Blogcritics and lead editor of the Culture section. As a writer he contributes most often to Culture, where he reviews NYC theater; he also covers interesting music releases and writes a semi-regular review round-up of independent albums. …

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