Middle age revisits upon us the transgressions that supple youth too easily shrugged away, and it can sometimes be healing not to seek resolution but simply to hold these heartaches unredeemed, unforgiven, just as they are, in all their disgrace. Webster’s long love affair with music has, for all its substantive edge and earned darkness, felt tinged throughout with undercurrents of redemptive affirmation—that irresistible voice is just too heavenly—and this is among his great gifts to us; yet it’s satisfying here to allow him to dwell on the negative, to move unrelenting into a dark space and probe the wound, mire in the bitterness. The song begins with a Soundgardenesque drum-and-bass groove cascaded by banshee guitar that eases up into an almost Little River Band pop, which then settles into the trenches of its lyric intention, framing verses that relentlessly harangue the hurt, that draw a line in the sand with Taylor Swift–like elegant non-negotiableness. “The truth abides, but you take it like a medicine.” Basler’s guitar goes way down deep and then soars. “I know that you could be a better man, but we ain’t never goin’ back again.”

Written & Produced by Billy Webster
Lead Guitar by Carl Basler
Recorded at The Jersey Dream
(c) Shampoo Girl Music, 2020