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This was Irish singer Gilbert O'Sullivan's only American #1. It sold 2 million copies, spent 6 weeks at the summit in America and earned him 3 Grammy Award nominations (Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, Song of the Year, and Record of the Year). It was the second best-selling single of the year in America behind Don McLean's "
American Pie."
This is a rather sad tale of the lonely, suicidal subject of the song being left at the altar and then telling the listener about the death of his parents.
Gilbert O'Sullivan has denied that this song is autobiographical or about the death of his father when he was 11. O'Sullivan said: "Everyone wants to know if it's an autobiographical song, based on my father's early death. Well, the fact of the matter is, I didn't know my father very well, and he wasn't a good father anyway. He didn't treat my mother very well."
In the first half of the '70s O'Sullivan enjoyed a succession of hits in the UK including 2 #1s. They were "Clair," which was inspired by the daughter of his manager Gordon Mills, 3-year-old Clair Mills, whom O'Sullivan baby-sat. The other one was "Get Down," which was a plea to his dog to get down off the furniture. He was the first Irish recording artist to have 2 UK #1 hits.
Gilbert O'Sullivan says in
1000 UK #1 Hits by Jon Kutner and Spencer Leigh: "'Alone Again (Naturally)' has no comic purpose at all, and it is not a song that people can dismiss like 'Get Down' or 'Clair.' Because it means so much to some people, I will not allow it to be used for karaoke or commercials."
At the end of the 1980's this was used as the opening theme song and "Get Down" the closing theme song of Masion Ikkoku, a Japanese animated series. They were used without authorization, which caused some controversy at the time. However the net result was that a new Japanese generation discovered Gilbert's music and his popularity grew in Japan. Some of his 1990's albums have only been released in Japan, where he has continued to enjoy some success.
In 1982 O'Sullivan took his former manager Gordon Mills to court over his original contract, ultimately winning back the master tapes to his recordings as well as the copyrights to his songs. Nine years later in 1991, O'Sullivan went to court again to sue the rapper Biz Markie, who used an unauthorized sample from this song in his track "Alone Again," which appeared on Markie's third album, I Need A Haircut. The judge made a landmark ruling in O'Sullivan's favor that the rapper's unauthorized sample was in fact theft. From this point on, artists had to clear samples or be subject to costly lawsuits.
O'Sullivan talked about the case in 2010 at a screening for the movie Out On His Own: Gilbert O'Sullivan. He said Biz Markie's record company approached him about sampling the song, and O'Sullivan asked to hear it before granting permission. "Then we discovered that he was a comic rapper," said Gilbert. "And the one thing I am very guarded about is protecting songs and in particular I'll go to my grave in defending the song to make sure it is never used in the comic scenario which is offensive to those people who bought it for the right reasons. And so therefore we refused. But being the kind of people that they were, they decided to use it anyway so we had to go to court."
This was featured in the 1999 film The Virgin Suicides.
O'Sullivan had an unusual image in the early '70s, performing in an outfit of pants and a flat cap. With his pudding-bowl haircut, he resembled a Depression-era street urchin. Around the time of the release of "Alone Again (Naturally)," he switched his outfit in favor of an endless series of collegiate-styled sweaters embossed with the letter "G." (thanks, Edward Pearce - Ashford, Kent, England, for all above)
Comments (23):
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The first verse opens as an emotional lament, the suicidal threat of an emotional person who has suffered a great loss. But like most suicidal threats, it is a bluff. (A person serious about suicide doesn't warn or threaten. They just climb the tower and end it all. And what reasoning for suicide! "In an effort to, make it clear.... of what it's like when you're shattered." He's not dying to die; he's dying to prove a point, a point everyone already knows. How boring! No wonder what happens next is what happens next, presumptuous melodramatic twit!) And like all melodramatic twits, this one comes to his senses. The wedding guests leave, after losing interest in his loss and his bluff ("'My God! That's tough / She stood him up'" Hardly sympathetic words, "that's tough." The double meaning there being the somewhat more sympathetic "that's a shame" and the tough-love callousness of "oh well, life is tough; roll with it."). And the guests leave with "'We might as well go home'" (again, hardly sympathetic) and the "me" of the song follows with "As I did on my own." On his own, going home. "Home" is a theme here. It's ours. We build a house (or rent an apartment), but we live in a HOME, a place that is uniquely ours. Home is the most natural place for us to be, so when we are forced back into our natural state of alone-ness, we go home. And then... "Alone again, naturally." The adverb here is the tell-all. We are born to die alone. It's our natural state. Cry if you must, but then get up off your ass, leave the chapel, and just go home. There is probably another wedding waiting for yours to finish. We need the space, thank you very much.
Now, the second verse.... "To think that only yesterday / I was cheerful, bright, and gay..." The key here is ONLY. It has that old double meaning we love so much. One is straight-forward, as in "Just yesterday I was happy! And now look at me! It all goes away so fast!" But the other, subtler meaning is in the brevity of pleasure. "Only yesterday" means here that the pleasure lasts about that long, a day's worth and no more. Life before yesterday sucked. Life was great yesterday. Today, life is bulls--t again. Just like those who ask, "Why worry about the afterlife, when you weren't here for the first 13 billion years, and you didn't seem to mind all that much." We'r alive for a brief instant of cosmic time; the rest is blackness. Love and happiness, the same. Life is mostly about dealing with alone-ness.
"Looking forward to / -- who wouldn't do? -- / The role I was about to play" .... Here the caution is against looking beyond tomorrow. The togetherness does not last.
Now, some real smooth touches. "But as if to knock me down / reality came around / and without so much, as a mere touch / cut me into little pieces." That "as if" is loaded. It reveals the ILLUSION of reality knocking you down. Reality doesn't knock you down, because WE ARE NEVER UP! "As if to knock me down" sounds its own warning against thinking you're being dragged down. You're not. Reality is that we live in the black hole. You're not being "knocked down;" you're being reminded that we don't get to play in the fields of the cheerful for very long. It's almost a "Where do you think you're going?" gesture. And the "mere touch" that's missing is the absence of any warning. Life doesn't warn, because reality never really does change. We just choose to fool ourselves into believing we have some silly level of control over circumstances.
The whole "if God exists / why did he desert me?" nonsense is just that, the nonsensical bluster of the fooled. You can't be deserted when you were all alone in the first place.
And then the brief bridge lyric, about unattended hearts never mending. "What do we do?" is followed not by an answer, but by a repeat of the question, because there is no answer. There is nothing to be done. Heartbreak never mends. We just move on and put make-up over the scars. But the make-up wears off from time to time, and we see the marks. They remain. Forever.
And I want to say something about the acoustic bridge here. It is almost cheerful. O'Sullivan is Irish by birth, and the Irish have a way of embracing their misfortunes. I think the almost lilting little bridge here is too cheerful to allow the song to be as sad as people want to make it out to be. It's almost an invitation to sway and hum and feel better. It's catchy, in a way. And don;t forget, it ends with the title line, "Alone again, naturally." It's as if the writer is saying, "Here that little ditty of a tune? Cheer up! It's cool, we're alone.. again.. NATURALLY! :-)
Now the final verse. "Never wishing to hide the tears" at his father's premature death is in keeping with the whole theme of the song. Why hide it? Why pretend anything is otherwise? Life sucks! People die, sometimes way too f--king young. Accept it, as he accepts his loss and cries over it, unashamed to let be, what be.
And then, when he tries to console his mother, "encourage" even, she shuts down and dies silently of a broken heart. His encouragement, to embrace the life you have left, was rejected. And wen you reject the natural states of man -- life is lonely, and life is for the living -- you spend to much time desperately chasing bad love or die. It's that simple.
And, by the end, he is alone again, naturally, as we all are. He accepts it, and puts off all idiotic talk of suicide, realizing that to be alone is natural. Uncomfortable, perhaps, but not as sad as we humans make it out to be.