The track the London music magazine Uncut singled out when it reviewed the album. A stand-alone video followed in 2014.
“‘Songs From A Room’, 2014 edition. You can’t make this stuff up… Echoes of Falbo’s heroes are all over 73, especially on ‘What I Could’ve Been’, with its Scrabble board of gleeful Simon and Dylan lifts… there’s no mistaking the sheer joy that animates this improbable collaboration.”
“In life we end up exchanging fantasies for destiny. I believe suffering is the resistance those fantasies create. As we learn about the rules of the world the resistance wanes and the result is similar to that of our first whim, we fly. Only this time we fly higher than anything we could've imagined on our own. So we easily give up what we could've been for what we truly are.”
The glorious poetic spheres of consciousness
In bayonets and broken corsets
Led me to believe I wouldn't be
All I could be outside the military.
Ah, but i didn't want to fight
For broken empires in disguise,
Nor behind no country.
I wanted siege upon protections of a city,
Become a general before the age of twenty.
Aaah, what a pity!
I could've realised, I should've foreseen!
What I could've been, what I could've been!
“You don’t understand, I could’ve had class”
Ah, the tolling bells that call the minds
To come and find the answers they'll forget tonight,
The sheer delight, the sight of empty halls,
Grafittied walls of dirty bathroom stalls,
Create the visions in the slumbered stares,
That can prove nothing and can go nowhere.
They will travel alone,
Pointed directions that can never be shown,
But by the many faces masked of the unknown,
And the surrender to the sweet silent tone.
I could've realised! I should've foreseen!
What I could've been, what I could've been
“What do I get? A one way ticket to Palookaville”
The dangling conversation,
Imaginations of the everlasting strangers,
Complaining of the crimes,
Protesting sighs beyond their non peculiar times:
"Women's rights are misogyny revived,
A brand of slavery just newly contrived"
But I hold no opinion,
Of new confederates losing battles to new unions,
Or new religions slaying children for dominion.
Let me just concentrate on making my first million.
Let me not realise, what I could've foreseen
What I could've been, what I could've been!
“I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve been somebody!”
Ah to control the mess of obviousness,
Of the smooth caress and daily stress of princesses,
I'd give my soul to know the cold
Of hands oppressed by promises too old.
Oh, but I could so easily tell,
That my lips kissed the bars of a cell,
Of sweet abundance,
I would abandon for a partner in the dance,
Like an old king protecting borders from the Lanc-
Elot of fear that would forbid that king a chance.
To have realised, to have foreseen...
What he could've been, what I could've been!
What I could have been.
“Instead of a bum, which is what I am. Let’s face it.”
The spoken lines in quotation marks are Terry Malloy’s, from On the Waterfront (1954).
Lyrics and notes from the artist’s archive; registration data from PRS and the IFPI ISRC database. See the album page, Publications, Praise and Quotes.