All I Really Need to Know I Learned from John Hiatt Lyrics - Page 3

As you can see, Hiatt's lyrics illustrate all the important iterations of the male condition:

1. I don't know exactly who the hell I am, but I seem to be an asshole. Why do you love me?
2. I'm only my father's son, so it ain't my fault. Wait a minute, how did I get here? What is the meaning of - hey, you're sexy!

"Only the Song Survives" distills this male confusion into a story in which a man dreams of a terrible car accident with a woman who may or may not be his wife. She explains:

Now don't you remember they put a patch on your eye
Like Dread Pirate Roberts, you looked so unplanned
They cut off my wedding ring and you started to cry
A one-eyed Niagara Falls man

"But I never married," objects the man. So is this injured woman with the wedding ring his wife? "Faces were changed... faces get strange," goes the refrain - as they are wont to do in dreams. The dream-man looks "unplanned" because he is. What could be more unplanned, more emblematic of losing control, than a car accident?

But I woke up sweating to breakfast in bed
And there were my children, and there was my wife
Post-traumatic stress, or just a bump on the head?
Or maybe the ride of my life

It's the ride of his life, all right, a ride of confusion, statelessness, and knocks on the head. Yet somehow his domestic life is still there for him. And he'll never figure out why. Woman, to him, is magic, like the

woman sawed in half, her legs in Tijuana
She was a bodyless head and trapeze artist in a circus in Bombay
Now a woman's gonna do exactly what a woman's gonna
Yeah, some bad magicians wouldn't have it any other way
She holds on to that trapeze by the skin of her teeth, or so they say

With images of a woman in two places at once and possessed of magical survival skills, Hiatt has now universalized his depiction of the split human condition. The passive (female) subject of the magic trick somehow finds her power and makes do even after she's been cut in half. Meanwhile the "bad magician," the songwriter, the caster of spells with words, feels his power, yet ultimately doesn't understand it any better than the average joe of "Buffalo River Home" does:

I've been circling the wagons down at Times Square
Trying to fill up this hole in my soul but nothing fits there
Just when you think you can let it rip
You're pounding the pavement in your daddy's wingtips
As if you had some place better to go...

Although domesticated, and walking in his father's footsteps, he's still listening for that "Something Wild," believing in the promise of "It'll Come To You":

Now you're happily married with a wife and kids of your own
But sometimes in the closet at night you can hear them rattlin' bones
Takin' bets on your future and your current postal zone
It's a spooky equation, but check out yourself, Jack, you're the great unknown...
[but] in the middle of the night, with your covers pulled up tight
It'll come to you

The understanding that will come to him, and the something wild that he both desires and fears, are two halves of the same nature. All of us have these dual natures. Now you know where to find out all you need to know about the particularly frustrating male version of this internal, eternal conflict: the lyrics of The Man himself, John Hiatt.

Article Author: Jon Sobel

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

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