Skip to main content

I heard the news today


 Bolton's big hit "How am I Supposed to Live without You" begins thus:

"I could hardly believe it/When I heard the news today/I had to come and get it straight from you/They said you were leavin'/Someone swept your heart away/From the look upon your face I see it's true."

That  strikes me as a marvelous bit of story telling. The rest of the song, unfortunately, soon slips into standard-issue '80s ballad.

But what exactly do I like about the above?

The first line sets up the rest, pressing the listener to ask what was so unbelievable.

We might already guess that a romantic disappointment was the hardly-believed thing, but we are steered subtly in another direction by "news".  The narrator didn't hear gossip or "the word".  He heard "the news".  For many of us that suggests headlines or something broadcast. 

Then it turns out, not until the third line though, the first suspicion was accurate. 

I could hardly believe it when I head the news today

I had to come and get it straight from you

They said you were leavin', someone swept your heart away

From the look upon your face I see it's true.

Although the song was famously sung by Bolton, it was not solely his work. As to the writing, Doug James shares the credit.  As to the singing, too, the story is a bit complicated.

The song was originally intended by the Bolton/James team for use by Air Supply. But Air Supply wanted lyric changes. Rather than rework it, the writer/composers sold the sing to Laura Branigan for a 1983 recording.

Bolton of course has a huge hit years later singing it in his own voice.

Now you know.

Labels:

Comments

  1. HenryMay 1, 2026 at 7:30 AM

    The expression "someone swept your heart away" means that you fell in love with someone. It does not require that your heart have been with someone else before someone swept it away. In the lyrics you quote, however, it can be read to mean that your heart was swept away from the speaker and not necessarily to someone else. The broom just swept it aimlessly; the emphasis is on the speaker's losing the person he or she loves, not on that person's falling in love with someone else.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ChristopherMay 1, 2026 at 8:54 AM

      Nice subtlety. In the following lines, the speaker asks the beloved to "tell me 'bout the plans you're making" -- presumably plans WITH the new significant other, but soon makes clear that that is a very hollow inquiry.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
23 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

A Quote from Parfit

Recently  I wrote a little about ethicist Derek Parfit. I've been doing further research on him since, and will now describe his Big Picture as I've come to understand it. Parfit believes that the western world only started taking ethical philosophy seriously (as a domain separate from theology) around the time Nietzsche declared that God was dead. There are only three possibilities, in terms of the God/morality issue: 1) You believe that God exists and that His commands define morality 2) You deny that God exists and, like Nietzsche, infer from this that in the absence of commands there is no right or wrong, or 3) You deny that God exists yet persist in believing and attempting to discern right and wrong. From a certain point of view there could be a fourth category, for people who believe that God exists but that His existence is irrelevant to morality, He doesn't issue commands at all, etc.  Still, from DP's perspective that sort of God ...
1 comment
Read more