We Could Be So Good Together

Album: Waiting For The Sun (1968)
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Songfacts®:

  • "We Could Be So Good Together" is an almost goofily upbeat song. It's been described as a leftover from Morrison's hippie influences, meant as a statement to the audience about all the beautiful things that can be achieved if everyone just gets together. Taken at face value, that would appear to be true, but looking closer at the lyrics reveals paradoxical sentiments in the song.
  • On its surface, the song does indeed seem to be a simple imploration for togetherness, with lines such as "Tell you 'bout the world that we'll invent, wanton world without lament" and the repeated "We could be so good together."

    There are two sections, however, that cast serious doubt on the whole idea of a simple song about togetherness. The first one is:

    Tell you lies
    I tell you wicked lies


    This sentiment calls into question the entirety of the song. The four "lies" lines are repeated twice, for eight total lines, making up a substantial portion of the lyrics. They can't be written off as insignificant, and they call into the question the rest of the song. Is the togetherness stuff all just a wicked lie?

    Then, the final verse says:

    The time you wait subtracts the joy
    Beheads the angels you destroy
    Angels fight, angels cry
    Angels dance and angels die


    Here, in Morrison's trademark fashion, the notions of death and violence are introduced into a seemingly optimistic song. He used the same technique in "Moonlight Drive," ending an otherwise gorgeous love song with the line, "Baby gonna drown tonight, goin' down, down, down."
  • Because Morrison's been long dead, we'll never know exactly what this song is about, but there appear to be three possibilities. It may indeed be a hippie rallying cry for everyone to get together and change the world. Why, then, the wicked lies and the decapitated angels?

    Or, the song is about how this togetherness, and possibly the whole hippie "thing," was a wicked lie. It could be a commentary on that scene and how Morrison saw it, which would not be hard to believe because Morrison and the Doors never claimed to be part of that scene. In many ways, they were the antithesis of that scene, in fact.

    The third possibility is that the song wasn't really about anything specific. Maybe Morrison just needed to scrabble something together. The dynamic tension created by paradoxical sentiments within any given piece of art has long been known as an effective way to captivate an audience. The ambiguity may have been entirely intended, with no easily nailed down meaning underneath.

    Jim Cherry, author of The Doors Examined, leans towards the latter interpretation. Speaking with Songfacts, he noted that the angel imagery in the song seems like "low hanging" fruit thrown together in haste for some album filler.

Comments: 1

  • Jackie Trojanowsky from TexasI think We Could Be So Good Together is a song about Mary Werbelow, Jim's first love. They broke up in the year before Jim graduated UCLA with a film degree. I'm sure her reasons were complex, and to make matters worse, she promised Jim over and over that they would get back together one day. Per Mary, Jim asked her to marry him, and told her the first 3 albums were about her. Jim couldn't understand why they couldn't get back together. Keep in mind that Mary was only ~21 years old when they broke up...so she may have truly thought one day.... After their breakup, Mary said that she would still talk to Jim, when he needed someone to talk to...but she left to study meditation in India a few months before the Miami concert, and from there it was downhill for Jim I think. It (not getting back with Jim) was a major regret in her life...she later said that no one could 'replace' him. After Mary, Pam Courson certainly filled the void of a love interest in Jim's life, but he thought about Mary for a very long time, and even at the Miami concert, he broke into song singing India, India, India. which I think was about Mary, who left for India a few months prior. Knowing that she promised Jim that she would give him another chance, this song makes sense to me. He was trying to tell her that the wait was painful. And I think the angels reference is just a reference to the human condition, their love and the damage she was doing making him wait. Mary later said (after his death) that she would cry every time she heard Break on Through because of the lyrics Arms that Chain, Eyes that Lie as she thought it was a reference to herself.
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