Post by the Scribe on Aug 6, 2021 8:34:44 GMT
“Lose Again”
Like ‘Someone to Lay Down Beside Me’, ‘Lose Again’ is a song written by the gifted singer-songwriter Karla Bonoff. The ballad was on the 1975 album ‘Hasten Down the Wind’, which I see as one of the exemplars of the ‘Seventies Sound’ that has found a revival today, as we see by the interest in documentaries like ‘Laurel Canyon’ and the tributes paid to the iconic artists of the era by many contemporary young artists. Like ‘Someone’, it’s a slow burn song of romantic melancholy bordering or even, frankly, crossing into psychological and spiritual despair. The imagery of feeling unable to ‘escape’ an unfaithful lover (‘Nothing can free me from this ball and chain’) is held in tension with the subject’s attempts at resolute action, the attempt to leave, to stand on one’s own. However, every time she seeks to follow through, she finds ‘Nothing can save me from this ball and chain’ (calling back to a similar motif from Ronstadt’s previous album, ‘Prisoner in Disguise.’) The lyrics are universal enough to apply to any situation which we have difficulty disentangling from, but open to interpretation about how pathological our loss of choice has become. The arrangement provides a counterpoint to the conflict via gorgeous, emblematically ‘seventies rock’ harmonies. Ronstadt’s soaring, mercurial voice — half lament, half cry for freedom — perfectly captures the song’s taut anxiety without tipping her hand about whether this prisoner will, or can, walk towards the open cell door.