One of the striking things about working in a care home is the pervading sense of homelessness. For nearly all of the residents, home is somewhere else, it’s the somewhere they would rather be, the somewhere they want to get back to. A small number spend much of their day literally looking for a door marked Exit. One resident is always dressed in a coat, on his way home to look after his mother. The sad truth is: for nearly all of them, home doesn’t exist anymore. (The houses they lived in have often been sold to pay for their care and/or the people who made those places home - their partners and children - have died more often than not, or moved on, starting new lives somewhere else.)
That’s why this song strikes such a chord. What’s so ironic about the song is in the middle of new-found happiness and joy the speaker is overcome by an overwhelming sense of loss. He has made himself homeless. He now has to live life in exile. It belongs to a what might be called the Lost Highway genre of music – after the song made famous by Hank Williams. The songs feature speakers lost and alone after being struck down by sin out on the highway. There is contact with the Other World or the Other Woman, which is transformative.
What’s so striking hearing Pitney after all these years is how strong the vibrato is in his amazing voice. There’s a constant subtle wavering in pitch, which is natural, not forced. It’s a smoky, country- tinged tenor. As Wings of Pegasus guitarist Fil Henley has pointed out in an analysis video, Pitney varies vocal texture by coming in and out of vocal ‘fry’ – a kind of vibrating cry sound when the the vocal cords are not quite properly connected - in a really expressive way. It makes his voice really distinctive.
The song is in the form of a confession by a fallen man. Astoundingly, he is sending a letter to his wife explaining why he has left her. At the core of the confession is the moment when he succumbs to temptation:
As we were dancing closely
All of a sudden I lost control as I held her charms
And I caressed her, kissed her
Told her I'd die before I would let her out of my arms
In a way the events of the story are so banal - the Other Woman takes him to a café near a motel – but, at the same time, they’re life changing. The way Pitney sings caressed her, kissed her, shows him immersed in the memory. The sibilance enhances the sense of him surrendering to sensuality. The phrase lost control is significant: this is part of an inner struggle between sin and faith, good and evil. But it’s a struggle he’s lost.
The song – a dark morality tale – has at its heart an unresolvable paradox: the idea that agony and ecstasy are not just closely related; they are one and the same thing. For him, such is his inner conflict, the ecstasy is agony:
Oh, I was only twenty four hours from Tulsa
Ah, only one day away from your arms
I hate to do this to you
But I love somebody new
What can I do
When I can never, never, never go home again?
The word only has huge emphasis here, & sudden high pitch, dramatizing the Sliding-Doors quality of the choice he’s made. Preceded by a vocal fry noise on I was, only is a word that throws the focus of meaning onto the phrase that follows: twenty-four hours from Tulsa. It shows how close he was to returning to his old life. But the more the speaker states how near he was to returning home, the further away it seems. The vibrato – signalling the longing – on arms is really intense. The speaker is struck down by guilt (I hate to do this to do) at the same time as acknowledging he’s moved on emotionally (I love somebody new). The helplessness behind the question, What can I do? – is marvellously realised by way it’s sung – splitting it into a balancing pair of questions – what can & I do? - both with rising pitch, reinforcing the sense of desolation. The triple negative – never, never, never – is sung at a much slower pace and with real deliberation, bringing home the sense of loss.
That same sense of loss can be felt throughout most care homes. There’s this torturous sense that home is somewhere out there, always out of reach. But home is now an abstract concept for most residents, fuzzy round the edges, and fading with each passing year.