The Shouting Stage

Album: The Shouting Stage (1988)
Charted: 89
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Songfacts®:

  • Romantic relationships can go through many stages, one of which is the shouting stage, which is when it turns hostile. Armatrading sings from the perspective of someone who is going through this stage, wondering how she got there and thinking back to when they were in the throes of love, "blind from the same light."

    There is no resolution and no advice, just an outpouring of emotion as we hear her inner dialogue trying to sort this out.
  • Most of Joan Armatrading's songs are not about things that happened to her, but are based on observations. This one was inspired by a couple she encountered who were sitting at a table in a restaurant in Australia. In a Songfacts interview with Armatrading, she said: "They were having an argument that just escalated, just got louder and louder, and then in the end the guy just got up and walked out and the woman was in tears. The whole restaurant heard this, and I just wondered, What got them to the shouting stage? What caused all this? I can lay money that I'm the only one that went home and wrote a song about it. That's just because I was present, I was aware, taking it in."
  • Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits played guitar on this track. Other musicians on the track were Pino Palladino on bass, Dave Mattacks on drums, and Jody Linscott on percussion. Armatrading wrote, produced and arranged all the tracks on the album.

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