I’m waiting for bad news to come
Here on my own
I know which way it’s coming from
I’ve left every single light on
And the doors wide open
I’m hoping
For bad news to come
I’m waiting for bad news to come
My toes frozen numb
Teeth bared to the gums
Some things will always go wrong
But some go nowhere
I don’t care
I’m just here
Waiting for bad news to come
For someday or someone
To somehow be begun
It’s all news here yet nothing seems young
And everything wrong
I long for bad news
I just wanted you to want me darling
I just wanted you to want me darling
I just wanted you to want me darling
What did you have to go and need me for?
I’m waiting for bad news to come
Dismantling the hours as they roll on and on
Pondering the deeds left undone
The words spoken but not sung
While I’m waiting for bad news to come
There’s more grey in your eyes
Than there is in your hair
We’ve got plenty of time
I just don’t know where
And it had to be you
But did it have to be now
And did it have to be here
With bad news coming round?
I just wanted you to want me darling
What did you have to go and need me for?
Now bad news sits outside
And taps on the glass
It says be true to my memory
Don’t be true to my past
And as the poetry of adolescence
Meets the bullet points of adulthood
There are no signposts, just suggestions
And none of them any good
So we wake without desire
And turn our collars up to the rain
Because bad news seems a lot better
Than always just staying the same
And now the lights are all fading
And I’m tired of explaining
I’m waiting and waiting
And waiting and waiting
I just wanted you to want me darling
What did you have to go and need me for?
Waiting For Bad News was written in October 2012 as a prequel to All That’s In Between, the final track on Youth (which I wrote some three years earlier). Its chorus echoes – or rather anticipates and inverts – the chorus of the album closer. Make of that what you will.
I was in a strange mood when I wrote this song. There is a certain petulance in the lyrics that is deeply unattractive. By this time I knew what shape and colour Youth was going to have, so I was almost writing material designed to fill certain stylistic gaps or mood requirements. I felt the album needed one track where the moaning wasn’t played for laughs.
As I wrote Waiting For Bad News I began to suspect there was a certain part of me that wanted to continue what had begun with Living In The Aftermath (an uncharacteristically tender song from Memoir Noir about denial being the best palliative for heartache). The narrator here is less passive, however, despite his principle activity being a static one: waiting.
It was originally going to begin with a Mogwai-esque instrumental build-up, but we axed the intro in favour of keeping the overall pace of the album a bit nippier (though we went on to play it that way at the concert on our live DVD, if you’re curious).
