Portions for Foxes: The Long Blondes

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

I don't want to be a broken record. I've said a lot here that I like songs that start with a bang, and songs about bad love. Well, here's a great song that does both, from the early-century British band The Long Blondes: You Could Have Both.

I don't kid myself about happy endings
I'm too old for that now

If I could sum the whole song up in two lines, those are the ones: this is a song about what you get when you can't get what you want. A song about what you settle for - no, what you plead to get, so you can get something.

It's a song about need, about want. The singer is the other woman - with seemingly no hope of getting rid of the first one. She's willing to give up nearly everything she has for nearly nothing from this man, just to have a piece of him, just to not be left out alone:

But you don't have to worry that much about the future
And it's not as if you ever did before
Because you'll always have everything just as you want it
And there'll always be a phone to ring at three in the morning
And you'll always have someone who'll drive you home

That's from the extraordinarily powerful spoken-word section towards the end. It's still all need, all what she can give, what she'll sacrifice to make this happen.

Remember: the song is You Could Have Both. And she's the both - she's trying to convince him that he can cheat, to get that little bit of him for herself, some of the time. And it's a barn-burner of a song as she makes that case.