The phrase is additionally relevant in its normal sense, though. He’s planning a goodbye to his wife and child, and perhaps his own goodbye to the world. The ‘e’ on the end of ‘bye’, as it’s spelt here, reminds us of ‘’bye’, the abbreviation of goodbye, and accordingly it’s pertinent in a dark way to the narrator’s intentions. The extra detail of the child, not present in Summer Days, makes the decision to kill all the more horrifying.Ī number of things are significant about the title and its recurrence in the first and fourth lines of the song.įirst, the expression is normally spelt ‘by and by’, and it’s used in connection with something expected to happen at some vague point in the future. The precise extent to which each person is responsible is unclear, but it transpires that the narrator is unfaithful and that, in his eyes, the woman is too.Īlong the way it’s implied that he and the woman get married and have a child. Something goes wrong in the relationship. Eventually movement all but ceases – he’s ‘rollin’ slow’, and his destination is death. His initial romantic intoxication, characterised by the exuberant energy of ‘paintin’ the town’ and freely ‘swingin’ my partner around’, gives way to a constrained ‘scufflin’’ and shufflin’’ and the pain implied by ‘walkin’ on briars’. As time moves on, we see the narrator has become increasingly unhappy.
We again have his memories of different stages of the relationship – here beginning with his initial interest in the woman before going on to recount his disillusionment, jealousy and eventual madness. Like that song Bye and Bye concerns the narrator’s unsuccessful relationship, and the theme of repeating the past. There are a number of similarities with Summer Days suggesting that the songs share the same narrator. Far from being the sweet, romantic song the tune suggests, the song is about a man on the verge of murdering his family.
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