#8, “Till the Next Goodbye,” The Rolling Stones (1974)

150 Favorite Songs, #8, “Till the Next Goodbye,” The Rolling Stones (1974)

Here’s is an experience I’ve never had: I’ve never been stuck in Manhattan, with a woman with whom I’m in a relationship that’s already all but ended, trying to ease the pain of that ending by asking simple questions like, “Honey, is there any place that you’d like to eat?” before tossing out suggestions, trying to manage my discomfort with the circumstances by being kind, but feeling too impatient with that discomfort to wait. I’ve never waited out the string on a dying relationship, nervy and anxious and sad all at once, trying to navigate a city I didn’t know well with someone I didn’t know as well as I should.

But when I listen to “Till the Next Goodbye,” I know what it would feel like if I did.

I’ve written a lot as part of this project about how songs have helped me reveal my own feelings. How I didn’t know what I felt until the song showed it to me. How without Tori Amos singing to her “Northern Lad,” I wouldn’t have been able to identify what was pulling me toward the end of a relationship. How without Elton John singing about “My Father’s Gun,” there is grief from my own dad’s death that I might have struggled to feel.  How I’ve needed “Hit ‘Em Up” to express anger that it would take me years in therapy to make space for in my body without Tupac’s help. That’s all part of why music is important to me, and why it always has been.

But “Till the Next Goodbye” is about something a little different to me. I discovered the song when I was a teenager because a band called Human Drama, which is sort of a weird goth-folk group I must have found out about from a magazine, put it on a covers album, and their version made me feel something that got me to seek out the Rolling Stones version.

This isn’t a famous Stones song. When Vulture did its ranking of all 374 songs the band wrote, they placed it right in the middle, #189. The album it came from, It’s Only Rock n’ Roll, isn’t a classic—it’s average critics rating is a six out of ten, and the title track is the only real hit it produced. I’m not a huge Rolling Stones fan, and it’s unlikely I’d have ever heard “Till the Next Goodbye” if it hadn’t been for that covers record. But hearing it—either version, really—made me imagine feelings I might have later in life. It caught my imagination in a way that made me love music, really love it, because it showed me something that wasn’t there and made it feel real to me.

Part of that is down to the specificity of the lyrics. It’s firmly set in New York, which—even though it would be years before I’d actually go to New York—I understood well enough from movies to place the streets the song names. There’s something cinematic about it, this idea of meeting at coffee shops and theaters and looking for some way to regain a lost connection in these places, knowing it won’t work. It’s sad in a way that very few Stones songs are sad (the whole appeal of Mick Jagger is that he’s Evil, Actually, not that he’s vulnerable), and that ache and melancholy of the song made the idea of being in a movie house on Forty-Second Street, waiting until the next time you say goodbye, seem incredibly romantic to me.

I might have, under other circumstances in life, spent my twenties chasing that melancholy feeling. These things we connect with when we’re young are powerful, and there’s a high drama in the simplicity of the song. And it is simple. The guitar is two chords, strummed gently, with basic piano chords accompanying them and the drums subdued until the song calls for a grander fill, Keith Richards playing riffs that barely capture your attention off on the side. But that just helps frame the melancholy of the song. It’s worldbuilding, done with a country piano and patient drums and an acoustic guitar so basic that anyone at all can play it, that helps create the mood.

And that mood is meaningful. When I heard “Till the next Goodbye,” I was just a kid, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old, with no idea how my life would unfold—but I wanted it to unfold in a way that would give me the opportunity to feel the things I felt when I listened to the song. I wanted it like I wanted to live in the city, like I wanted an apartment with hardwood floors like they had in Reality Bites. I wanted to live a life that took me to New York to feel big feelings. I wanted what happens in the second chorus—a remarkable moment, especially for the Rolling Stones—where Mick Jagger interrupts his own simple chorus (“till the next time that we say goodbye,” repeated three times, followed by “I’ll be thinking of you,” repeated three more) for a bridge where the trick of the song, of the pretending that’s at the heart of the song, breaks, and the lines change to “I can’t go on like this / can you / can you / I can’t go on like this / can you?” It made me want a life where whatever I felt—happy, sad, devastated, hopeful—would feel big, would feel powerful, would feel like it was written and recorded by the Rolling Stones.

There are other interpretations of the song. Even though it’s considered a lesser part of the band’s discography, coming from a band as culturally significant as the Rolling Stones, it’s got its adherents. Apparently they mostly agree that the song is about an affair, and all of these New York rendezvous points are where the singer and the woman he’s singing to are meeting up, and that chorus is about the parting as they go back to their respective partners. That all sounds convincing, and I’m sure it’s correct. I never heard any of that in it. I still don’t, really—because I’ve always only ever heard the song as a revelation of a feeling I hadn’t yet had.

Ultimately, I never would have that exact feeling. Not really. I’ve had breakups that were protracted and painful, and I’ve been heartbroken in much of the country. I’ve tried to piece together a struggling relationship in strange cities, doing our best to hold it together despite the many things pulling us apart. But none of that ever really felt like “Till the Next Goodbye” to me. The song taught me to romanticize certain feelings, but learning to do that also taught me that you can’t live your life to match them, because there’s something beyond the feeling that you can’t ever reach. If you could—if life could ever feel exactly like the song, or the movie, or the book, or the story in your head—then you wouldn’t need those things in the first place.

So many of my favorite songs are favorites because of the way they matched a feeling I was having. “Till the Next Goodbye” feels like a magic trick to me because it matched a feeling I wanted to have. It turns out I already did, just by hearing it. It left me free to choose happier pursuits, and I’m forever grateful for that.