A Lyrical Mess: the Rod Stewart song he called “very confused”
A veteran rocker like Rod Stewart usually keeps his songs fairly straightforward. Even though he can take a piece in many different directions once it’s finished, it’s important to have the base of a tune before you start carving it into different shapes that no one had ever thought of. But while Stewart knew that he had hit on something interesting with ‘You’re In My Heart’, it ended up going down more than a few twists and turns after the first few verses.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Considering that some of the best songs have different episodic structures, it’s usually nice to have different scenes play out every time another verse comes around, typically keeping the listener on their toes and making them zero in on every aspect of the tune.
It’s not like every piece of the puzzle has to make sense. Some of the greatest songs of the 1960s were inspired visions that people would see when they were tripping on acid, and even in the later decades, bands like Oasis were carrying on the tradition of lyrics that sounded super important while having the most mystifyingly odd lyric sheets ever created.
Then again, ‘You’re In My Heart’ doesn’t feel like it should be too cerebral. Looking at each verse, this just feels like a standard love song, as Stewart reassures his lover that his relationship will endure forever. These kinds of works come and go in rock history, though, so Stewart decided to write parts of the piece about another one of his loves: sports.
Outside of saying it was about his girlfriend Britt Ekland, he thought that part of it came down to singing about football, telling Classic Rock Stories, “It wasn’t totally about Britt. It could have been about anybody I met in that period. It’s a very confused song, in a way. It’s about a love more than just women. It’s also about my love for soccer. That’s why my two favourite teams are mentioned at the end. The chorus is about Scotland. So it ends up being about three women, two football teams, and a country.”
While it’s one thing to express your love of everything under the sun, cramming all of it into one rock song means that the songwriter is treading on thin ice. After all, people latch onto a piece that’s personal to the singer, and having seven different topics spread out across a few minutes of a pop tune not only gets the listener confused but also ruins the personal angle.
But on the other hand, some of those disconnected songs go from being completely incoherent to universal, and ‘You’re In My Heart’ seems to fit that bill pretty well. Sure, it is far from being the best thing that Stewart had ever done, but looking at his track record for making love songs, the tune went through so many topics that it seemed to flip all the way back around to becoming endearing. You could sing this to an old flame, but there’s a good chance that you could also sing some lines to your cat, and no one would bat an eye.
