Tuneful Tuesday: Don’t Sleep in the Subway by Petula Clark

I’d like to share a song with you by Petula Clark, called (as you’ll never guess, since it’s not as though it’s explicitly mentioned in the post title or anything) Don’t Sleep in the Subway.

“You wander around

On your own little cloud

When you don’t see the why or the wherefore.

You walk out on me

When we both disagree,

‘Cause to reason is not what you care for.”

I love this song. (It tends to make me think of that Dick van Dyke episode where Rob and Laura have a fight and Rob storms out to the car, forgets the key, and spends the night in the garage because he would feel too stupid going back in. But that’s irrelevant.)

One of the reasons I like this song is because it’s unique. How many love songs are there about trying to talk sense into a husband who’s a drama queen? A lot of pop songs present love as “I’m in love and it’s perfect and my loved one is perfect and nothing in life will ever be hard again!” (Which can be pretty cute, and there is a realistic element to that, in a sense. But that’s for another day.) This one is different, though. The message of this song is, “My loved one is not perfect. He’s flawed…but we can work it out anyway.”

I think that’s a really powerful message, really – because the fact of the matter is that no one is going to be perfect. If you fall in love and put your loved one on a pedestal, imagining him to be some perfect being, you are (sadly) going to be disappointed. If you go into a relationship saying, “You have flaws, and I have flaws, but we can work on them together,” that’s likely going to end up as a happier, healthier relationship. (Of course, depending on how serious those flaws are, it’s possible the relationship shouldn’t be pursued…all I’m trying to say is that the perfect man or woman simply does not exist.)

Anyway. Enough rambling. Here’s the song:

(Doesn’t she have a lovely voice?)