We Can Never Go BACK

In about a week and a half, I'm competing in a singing competition for the National Association of Teachers of Singing in the musical theater category. I gotta say, I'm stoked for my repertoire for this competition. One of the songs that I'm performing has become really important to me. The song is "Back to Before" from Ragtime, the 1996 musical.

Before you listen to the song, here's what I have to say about it.

Back to Before makes me so emotional in a profound, speechless, kind of way. I mean, just fundamentally, the orchestration of this piece is EXQUISITE and the lyrics are so nuanced. It's a tender tune with great movement, great passion, and great variety of emotion.

I love that this piece simultaneously represents an "undoing" and a force of self-empowerment. The singer is a woman who has been in a horribly neglectful relationship with a man that she is entirely in love with. The song is her lament for the love of their previous years, tied with some guilt of her own wrong doing in the relationship, and the verbalizing of all the signs she missed tied to some serious self-hatred.

But the song is also about her independence. It features her coming to terms with her limitations and her recognition of the inevitability and permanence of her past. I love this song because of her decision to be "unafraid to be strong."

The first verse:
"There was a time/ our happiness seemed never ending. / I was so sure / That where we were heading was right. / Life was a road, / So perfect and straight and unbending / Our little road, with never a cross road in sight. / Back in the days, / When we spoke in civilized voices / Women in white, and sturdy young men at the oar. / Back in the days when I let you make all my choices... We can never go back to before."


The second verse:
"There was a time / My feet were so solidly planted / You'd sail away / While I turned by back to the sea. / I was content / A princess asleep and enchanted. / If I had dreams, then I let you dream them for me! / Back in the days when everything seemed so much clearer, / Women in white, who knew what their lives held in store. / Where are they now? / Those women, who stared from the mirror... We can never go back to before."

The notion of being vacant for someone.
Being blank so that they can be bright.
Being a puppet for someone's whims.
Existing to the truth of another's heartbeat.
And the second half of this stanza features another one of my strong suits: comparing. I know EXACTLY what she means when she disassociates herself as a woman who stared from the mirror, and that is, painfully unique. The singer subconsciously wishes for the simple life of simple women with a strong husband, but is liberated from that prison.

The final verse and the climax of the song bears these lyrics:
"There was a time / When you were the person in motion / I was your wife. / It never occurred to want more. / You were my sky. / My moon and my stars and my ocean."

And then finally: "We can never go back to before. We can never go BACK... to before."
I think these final words hurt her so much. These words are representative of her literally cutting the ties with these memories. This is the moment when she surrenders the hope of her past being any different.

This song just resonantes with me in such a deep way. I am quick to fall in love with the past, to idolize my memory, to lust for the familiar, and to frustrate myself thin with what I could have done or should have said or what not. And this song is a great reminder to me that that way of thinking is a complete waste of time. It's normal to have regrets and frustrations about your circumstances, and the way that these things have panned out, but it is not okay to consciously, willingly, RETREAT to the past. That is the message of this song for me.