Pretty Girls Make Graves by The Smiths

Album: The Smiths (1984)

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Songfacts®:

This song finds Morrissey telling the story of a teenage boy being pressured by his attractive, promiscuous girlfriend to have sex with her. The song ends with the boy losing his girl to another guy. Morrissey laments he's "lost his faith in womanhood," then sings the opening couplet to The Smiths' first single, the gay-themed "Hand in Glove" ("Hand in glove. The sun shines out of our behinds.")
The song title is a quote from Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel The Dharma Burns.
The early 2000s Seattle band Pretty Girls Make Graves took their name from the song.
An early version of this song, produced by the Teardrop Explodes' Troy Tate, was pulled from the archives for the B-side of the 1987 UK single release of "I Started Something I Couldn't Finish."

Comments: 3

Uri from BrazilI always understood that the other man who took her hand was the narrator himself; he gives it up to lust, but does not recognize himself while doing it, so he speaks of his act as one of another man's; since he betrayed both his idealized self and his idealized romance with a woman, and cannot understand his true (gay) self, he loses his faith in womanhood
Misougenous from ItalyIs evident that the songs talk about a celibate, just like Morrisey, who loses his promiscuous friend because she forget him to another stupid boy.
Neil from Birmingham, UkI don't buy it. This song is about the danger pretty girls that fancied you posed if you were gay. You have a difficult line to walk; you can't say no because she's pretty but you would rather do anything else. 'I'm not the man you think I am' and 'I could have been wild and I could have been free, but nature played it's trick on me.' That trick is surely the subverting of his sexual desires to men instead of women.

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