#19, “Green Eyes,” Erykah Badu (2000)

150 Favorite Songs: #19, “Green Eyes,” Erykah Badu (2000)

If an artist is really lucky, there might a time or two in their life where they’re possessed by whatever creative spirit allows them to make something that it doesn’t seem fully intuitive that a human being could create it. I don’t know what it’s like inside of her head, but my hunch is that Erykah Badu has had a disproportionate number of those moments. I don’t know how else to make sense of a song like “Green Eyes.”

Settle in for this one, because it’s ten minutes long, moving in three distinct suites. Whether you’ve listened to it a hundred times or never, definitely click play here, because I promise you it’ll make the next ten minutes better than they would have been otherwise.

In the song’s first movement, Badu sings like Billie Holiday, on a microphone and accompanied by a piano that are either of that vintage or are styled to sound like they are. Somewhere in the distance, there’s a saxophone drifting in. Somewhere, some of the time, there’s a second Erykah Badu layering her voice on top of the original article. The lyrics she sings are similarly old-fashioned, using green eyes as a metaphor for jealousy the way Shakespeare did. You could believe someone came up with them in 1920 instead of 2000. They’re also funny, with Badu singing a rationalization of her feelings that’s clever and economical, just two lines to put you in the headspace of someone who refuses to cede power in a breakup to the person who’s making her jealous, even as she is overwhelmed by the feeling. “my eyes are green cuz i eat a lot of vegetables,” she sings, “it don’t have nothing to do with your new friend.” She sings it twice in the song’s intro, then again after a brief verse. The third time through, she hesitates between “new” and “friend” and in that pause, we enter the second movement. The staticky pops that give the song its vintage feel disappear, and the piano moves forward in the mix, suddenly immediate as she sings a torch song.

In the second movement, we get a full jazz band—piano, bass, drums, and a flute, and Badu meandering her way through more lines about insecurity and confusion, until she realizes that she’s repeating herself and starts improvising syllables, soft “ooh, ooh, ooh” giving way to “dum-diddy-da-da,” and then she puts her foot down: “i’m so confused,” she sings. “you tried to trick me.” At that point, the band starts to tighten, the meandering jazz notes picking up rhythm and we get the first of a few emotional climaxes to the song, where all the hurt starts to pour out. She’s still herself, still has a sense of humor (“silly me, i thought you love was true / change my name to silly e. badu”), and still pines away, more improvised syllables leading to a refrain “i hope it’s not too late, too late, too late, too late, too late,” and then we hit the third movement.

Once we get into this part of the song, we’ve got something a little more traditionally Erykah Badu, something that fits into the neo-soul sound that was coined, more or less, so that critics could contain her music (and D’Angelo’s, and maybe Maxwell’s) in a single term. The drums are louder in the mix and the band plays together like they’re there to back her up, rather than her fitting herself into what they’re doing. There’s a hook, finally, an organ riff tying everything together. And Badu sings her heart out here, another emotional climax, begging “just make love to me, just one more time and then you’ll see” and immediately second guessing herself: “i can’t believe i made a desperate plea, what’s with me?” And the band gets faster, more urgent, more immediate as the third suite hurtles toward its conclusion, Badu making her peace with the situation she’s found herself in, moving through the stages of grief—she started in denial, went to anger, tried bargaining, ended up in depression, and finally moves to acceptance. “you can’t be what i need you to / and i don’t know why i fuck with you,” she sings, ending the song with a look toward the future: “i know our love will never be the same / but i can’t stand these growing pains.”

It’s just—whew, it’s a journey. There are other great breakup songs, of course, but I can’t think of another one that really attempts to go through the whole struggle, the emotional shifts that come with making sense of that loss, that does it with such class and grace and humor, that looks inward as much as it looks out, that spans styles and genres because how could just one kind of sound capture all that feeling? It’s so wildly ambitious, and while sometimes simplicity is what’s called for, it’s not what called Badu. I don’t really know how a person writes a song like “Green Eyes” unless something is moving through them. There’s just too much going on to fit into one person’s head. I’m glad it did.