Time After Time
Have we talked about this before?
Title: Time After Time
Album: She’s So Unusual (1983)
Songwriters: Rob Hyman, Cyndi Lauper
Note: For simplicity, I’ll be referring to the narrator as “she” since many of us know the song best from Cyndi Lauper’s recording. I’ll refer to “you” in the song as simply the “other person” — we don’t know who it is and we can’t infer very much about the relationship. Maybe it’s romantic, maybe it’s familial; the official music video underlines the ambiguity.
This 80s classic has been covered by many artists, played at many weddings, and has stood the test of time because of its haunting melody and its almost trance-inducing and reassuring repetition. It’s almost a lullaby that wraps you in a sonorous cocoon. It’s hard not to sing along when we hear this song. But it’s not just ear candy — there’s real food for thought here, with carefully-selected imagery that invites us to enjoy the taste without overindulging in exposition. Let’s take a look.
Lying in my bed
I hear the clock tick and think of you
We start with a couple short lines that beautifully and efficiently create a very complete setting: the speaker can’t sleep. We can probably assume it’s nighttime and wishes she could sleep, but instead she’s listening to the ticking sound of a nearby clock. It’s common enough to be relatable but still it draws you in, wondering why she’s thinking of this other person. It sounds like she wishes they were together — why aren’t they?
In an interesting Rolling Stone interview, Lauper tells the story of the incredibly loud alarm clock in her bedroom that inspired the lyric. It wasn’t the alarm that was so loud, but the ticking itself. She says she likes to bring an element of her reality into her songs, and talks about how real moments — even the mundane ones — have a way of connecting us in the context of storytelling.
Caught up in circles
Confusion is nothing new
More relatable details — clarity eludes us when we’re tired and can’t sleep, yet we persist in trying to make sense of a difficult situation. It’s not the right setting for deep thought but we just can’t help it. We search in vain for answers to the why and the why not and the how questions.
Flashback, warm nights
Almost left behind
Suitcase of memories
The speaker replays video clips in her mind, as if watching a movie, presumably of time spent with the other person. Maybe the events seem so long ago that they’re almost forgotten. As she thinks about it, it’s like there’s a whole suitcase of these clips, packed away in a container. But why were they packed up? Were they to be stored away so they will be out of sight, out of mind — like a box in the attic? Or are they packed in a suitcase so they would be ready to go somewhere with her again? Maybe they might be needed for a relationship that is now broken but could hopefully resume?
Time after
In a clever songwriting flick of the wrist, the writers set up an expectation of a common phrase. If I said, “One step forward,” you would know to complete it with “two steps back.” If I said, “money doesn’t,” you’d probably guess “grow on trees.” If you’ve never heard this song before, you expect the phrase to complete with the word “time” because we use it often enough — time after time I clean the garage but it fills up with clutter again. If you have heard the song before, you know the chorus and it does complete the phrase. So here we go, finish it….
Sometimes, you picture me
Hey! Lucy pulled the football away from Charlie Brown. That’s not how it’s supposed to end. But, kinda — it does have the word “time” in there. OK, we see what you did there. Let’s continue. “You picture me” — How do you know what the other person pictures? Is this a 3rd-person omniscient narrator? Probably not; she most likely learned this from conversations from the other person, as in [You said] sometimes you picture me….
I’m walkin’ too far ahead
You're callin' to me, I can't hear what you've said
Then you say, "Go slow", I fall behind
The second hand unwinds
What does it mean that she’s walking too far ahead? Is she trying to lead them somewhere? Is this the stereotypical dating couple’s issue where one person is moving “too quickly” for the other person? Is she not staying in the moment and instead flitting from one point of interest to another, chasing proverbial “shiny objects?”
The other person has told her that they call to her but she can’t hear what they’ve said (otherwise how would she know they spoke?). At some point she stops and they regroup, so the other person can ask her to slow down. Then for some reason, she’s the one who falls behind. Going back to the title, “Time After Time,” it would seem she’s implying that over and over they can’t seem to get their pacing, or their relationship itself, in sync. They try to adjust to each other, but they end up just trading places. The cycle repeats, and the futility of it seems to set in — “the second hand unwinds,” maybe as if to say “while we’re trying to work this out, our life is slipping away.”
Lauper said the part about the second hand unwinding was inspired by a colleague’s off-hand comment about their broken watch. The second hand was literally going counter-clockwise. His phrasing seemed poetic enough to include it in the song, and as with the reference to her own alarm clock at the beginning, she wanted to include a bit of her own reality. But regardless of the inspiration, the meaning seems to lean toward something being wrong, or the end of a chapter (the relationship, or the inevitable replacement of a watch that is now broken).
Unlike many of its contemporaries in the 2020’s, this song took its time building a story with two verses before finally resolving some tension and giving us a chorus:
If you're lost, you can look and you will find me
Time after time
If you fall, I will catch you, I'll be waiting
Time after time
If you're lost, you can look and you will find me
Time after time
If you fall, I will catch you, (I'll be waiting) I will be waiting
Time after time
It seems possible that the relationship is still ongoing, and she’s saying even though they might not be in the same place at the same time, they can always reconnect and she’s willing to keep adjusting as much or as often as it takes to make it work.
Here’s one of the things I especially appreciate about the song. It may be obvious, but we need to acknowledge the repetition of the title serves not only as a catchy hook, but also a reflection of the subject itself — a realization of a seemingly unending, maddeningly repeating cycle. How often does she use the phrase? Many times — time after time, she says, “Time after Time.” It’s almost onomatopoeia — we say “BANG!” to describe something that makes a loud noise, and we say “POP!” when there’s a small explosion. Here she says “Time after time” repeatedly to underline the feeling of an endless cycle. It’s a bit like Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence,” where there is intentional space left between the lines of the poem, with a sparse guitar ostinato tying the fabric of the song together. It’s almost silent at times, to make a point.
Lauper says she struggled to finish the lyrics. It was weighing on her and she was running out of time before the album deadline. She describes an unusual experience where she felt a hand on her shoulder telling her to calm down.1 She started to think of opposites: up/down, top/bottom. So began using a lyrical mirroring effect: lost/find, fall/catch. Soon, the chorus was complete.
Sonically, there’s a comforting repetition not only in the two main couplets of the chorus, but also in the many instances of the i sound in ‘find’ and ‘time’ — there are no less than 15 of them altogether. So many, in fact, that they almost sound predictable, like the ticking of the second hands of a clock. Or maybe even like the chiming of a grandfather clock, breaking a cycle to say something new has come.
To that point, we read the next lines and see that maybe there isn’t hope for the relationship to continue, but rather a chapter has closed and it’s time for a different kind of relationship.
After my picture fades and darkness has turned to gray
Watchin' through windows, you're wondering if I'm okay
Secrets stolen from deep inside
The drum beats out of time
How else can we express the passage of time? We’ve already used the ticking hands of a clock (twice). How about a picture fading? Before everyone had digital pictures on their mobile devices, we had printed pictures and some of us still keep a few on our walls. But over time, they will fade, as if to remind us that the moment keeps moving further away. The “darkness” might be akin to the place where the other person would “get lost” and she would find them. But it also could mean the darkness of a lost relationship; when we’re going through sadness we might describe it as a dark time in our life. But what’s that thing that “heals all wounds?” Ah yes — time. So the picture fades and the darkness fades to gray, both saying time has past but in a different context — they seem to be apart now: “Watchin’ through windows” [from a distance] “you’re wondering if I’m okay” [why would they have to wonder unless they weren’t talking anymore?].
Now we come to one of the most ambiguous lines of the whole song: secrets stolen from deep inside. What secrets? How were they stolen? By whom? Deep inside what? These are the lyrics that frustrate attempts at interpretation because they have meaning to the author we may never understand, and instead of them spelling it out for us we are invited to fill in the blanks with our own situation. Maybe the breakup forced difficult conversations and hard admissions of woundedness or brokenness. Things that otherwise wouldn’t have been shared, so they almost feel “stolen.” They were deep inside to protect them, but now they’ve been taken out into the light of day and the other person has them. They can’t be taken back, so they feel like they are in someone else’s possession without permission. Likely, none of the above, but something known only to writers Rob Hyman or Cyndi Lauper.
“The drum beats out of time.” As a drummer, I know all too well that to play “out of time” is a cardinal sin. Like scissors are supposed to cut and a pencil is supposed to write, a drummer is supposed to keep time. So either she’s saying “all hell has broken loose,” as it would be in a band with an off-rhythm drummer, or the authors know they’ve milked the clock metaphor for all it’s worth and they’ve gone on to say that we’ve reached the end in a new way. The drum beats out of time. We’re out of time; there’s no more fixing or solving, no more do-overs. Their time is up. And yet, the chorus comes back again. She seems to be saying that even though things aren’t what they used to be, she will still be there for the other person.
Then, an instrumental break, reflective and moody. Appropriate for reminiscing on the part of the listener. Almost a guided meditation, inviting the listener to answer the question, “What in your life has ended, but involves someone for whom you still care deeply?” Or maybe it’s not a person, but a situation or a group of friends or a time in your life when things seemed simpler. How are you managing that loss? Have you moved on? Is it time to do so now?