Round And Round (It Won't Be Long)

Album: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969)
Play Video

Songfacts®:

  • "Round and Round (It Won't be Long)" is a pretty song about time and mortality. It extends the theme of "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere," which immediately precedes this song on the album.

    In "Everybody Knows," Young sang about the hectic pace of his life and yearning for the simple, slow tempo of his small-town childhood home. In "Round and Round," we see those sentiments broadened and made more abstract.
  • The song is built around the lyrics:

    Round and round and round we spin
    To weave a wall to hem us in


    The line calls to mind the futile business of life, with everyone preoccupied with activities that ultimately imprison them. It's stated somewhat abstractly here, but Young has a clear pattern throughout his career of seeing modern life in this way. He was already exploring this existential theme in "Here We Are In The Years," released less than four months earlier on his debut album.
  • There are some mysterious phrases in this song, such as:

    How slow and slow it goes
    To mend the tear that always shows
    It won't be long, it won't be long


    The verse:

    It's hard enough losin'
    The paper illusion
    You've hidden inside


    Is about losing our idealistic views of the world and having to "step on your pride and cry."

    The most haunting verse is the last:

    How the hours will bend
    Through the time that you spend
    Till you turn to your eyes
    And you see your best friend
    looking over the end
    and you turn to see why,
    And he looks in your eyes and he cries


    Here we find Young with his usual fatalism summarizing the theme of the song with an image of the dark abyss that is time and our own mortality. Not exactly happy or hopeful, Young nonetheless manages to make it beautiful.
  • Joni Mitchell has cited Young's "Sugar Mountain" as an inspiration for her song "The Circle Game," but it's interesting to note that the latter bears a strong similarity to Young's "Round and Round." Both songs are about time, age, and mortality, and both have a chorus that includes "round and round and round," with "round" repeated three times in each.
  • Young wrote this in his cabin and originally intended it for his group Buffalo Springfield.
  • Robin Lane sang harmonizing vocals on this song. In the '80s she had a band named Robin Lane and the Chartbusters. They released three albums with Warner Brothers and had one of the earliest MTV hits with "When Things Go Wrong" in 1981. She later started Songbird Sings, which helps people work out their trauma through music. In Shakey, she talked about the recording process with Neil Young. "I thought we were just rehearsing," she said. "I didn't even know what I was singing... Neil was the original punk rocker."

Comments: 2

  • Anonymous from WisconsinRobin Lane's vocals are what carry this song into the end zone. Too bad she and Neil didn't do more together.
  • AnonymousI have been listening to this song for 30 years. Haunting and mesmerizing.
see more comments

Editor's Picks

The Police

The PoliceFact or Fiction

Do their first three albums have French titles? Is "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da" really meaningless? See if you can tell in this Fact or Fiction.

Director Paul Rachman on "Hunger Strike," "Man in the Box," Kiss

Director Paul Rachman on "Hunger Strike," "Man in the Box," KissSong Writing

After cutting his teeth on hardcore punk videos, Paul defined the grunge look with his work on "Hunger Strike" and "Man in the Box."

Rufus Wainwright

Rufus WainwrightSongwriter Interviews

Rufus Wainwright on "Hallelujah," his album Unfollow The Rules, and getting into his "lyric trance" on 12-hour walks.

80s Video Director Jay Dubin

80s Video Director Jay DubinSong Writing

Billy Joel and Hall & Oates hated making videos, so they chose a director with similar contempt for the medium. That was Jay Dubin, and he has a lot to say on the subject.

Facebook, Bromance and Email - The First Songs To Use New Words

Facebook, Bromance and Email - The First Songs To Use New WordsSong Writing

Where words like "email," "thirsty," "Twitter" and "gangsta" first showed up in songs, and which songs popularized them.

Barney Hoskyns Explores The Forgotten History Of Woodstock, New York

Barney Hoskyns Explores The Forgotten History Of Woodstock, New YorkSong Writing

Our chat with Barney Hoskyns, who covers the wild years of Woodstock - the town, not the festival - in his book Small Town Talk.