It seems to me
Like you’ve got some plans
Up your sleeves,
But I’ll be damned
If all those little things
Don’t come to call again,
Demand to be let in,
Haunt us all now and then.
But hate wears a harness of hope,
Round its ears, round its eyes
Round its throat.
It feeds on what we know
And spits it right back out.
It hurts so much to hold
But I ain’t about to let go now.
Our love was like an island
But an island with no shore.
You kept passing me those apples
But all I ever get is the core.
Some day you’re going to go,
But don’t desert me now.
It hurts so much to hold
But I ain’t about to let go now.
And if there’s one thing that I know
It’s that the heart will drive you mad,
Just look at all the happy endings
Wandering round looking so sad:
They’re waiting down below
For love to dig them out.
It hurts so much to hold
But I ain’t about to let go now.
A slave to the age sold us a lie
With a cold and craven chorus
Congregated close behind.
The song started low
But ended very loud
It hurts so much to hold
But I ain’t about to let go now.
I was working on this song at the same time as I wrote Love At A Price (the second track on 2011’s Get Religion! EP). While that song is all aggression and sass, this one tiptoes round certain issues that flavour all struggling relationships.
It Hurts So Much To Hold came at the point where I was trying to rein in my writing to make it less cartoony. Most of the numbers I sing on Found Drowned are quite over-the-top. The duets between Alison and I tended to be about predators and prey. By this time I was less interested in murder ballads; relationships are interesting enough without injecting death and melodrama into them. Most of us have experienced a time (be it within the context of a relationship or anything else) where you’re hanging onto something that you know is utterly poisonous and yet you can’t give up on it. It’s interesting how so many people are such suckers for punishment.
