I’ve been listening to Al Stewart’s “Almost Lucy” for about 30 years now. I just looked it up on Google and gave out a short, desperate gasp: I had no idea it was 30 years since Stewart’s album “Time Passages” was released. I’m a little stunned.
[I can’t find a good live version of it: too much talking and bad audio.]
“Almost Lucy” has a wonderful lead acoustic part in the bridge– exquisitely symmetrical and tidy– I like it in spite of it’s prettiness. I like the whole song but that’s the part I listen for.
Lucy is an aspiring singer whose “heart was never in it”. She stays around “just long enough to get paid”. She doesn’t dream of becoming famous, and doesn’t believe she is going to become famous– she almost seems to just be putting in her time, her dues. That’s a bit odd– it’s sober. This is not a fiery song about illusions crashing down– they were never up– t’s about a sober reassessment of one’s position in life.
The chorus:
Hey, hey, hey, I think you almost
feel the pain coming on inside
Hey, hey, hey, I think you almost
feel it now and you don’t know why.
You don’t know why
Lucy never bought entirely into the false hopes, so she buries her grief inside, gives up, moves to California. She even, ruefully, insists that her aborted musical career was not a “waste”. That’s an insightful little comment– that’s something real people do all the time: rationalize away what they now see as a foolhardy investment of time and passion.
I like the fact that Stewart presents us with a portrait of a relatively sensible, down-to-earth woman with a fairly realistic grasp of things. In general, the public prefers the melodrama, the flaming ambition followed by success, the drugs, the revelation of the childhood trauma, the catastrophic failure, despair, and then the cosmetic surgery, the comeback, and Brad Pitt.
A star is born. Not Lucy, though.
Why?
Because then it doesn’t go to our hearts. It doesn’t affect us, really. It creates rivers of phony tears to show everyone that we have feeling, but not a single real emotion. “Almost Lucy” is heart-breaking because it reveals a larger truth… one that most of us would rather not believe.
Almost Susan
The popular illusion that we audiences judge performers and entertainers on talent rather than looks is getting a glorious go round because of the Susan Boyle story. Don’t we all feel better about ourselves?
“Almost Lucy” is a corrective– even Lucy doesn’t quite expect audiences to really respect her. “They kick you ’round so much when you’re not a star”.
She just hopes, for that night, the contract won’t be broken.
“Leroy got a better job so we moved”… is Michelle Shocked’s “Anchorage” a sly prescient portrait of Sarah Palin?