Robert's Smith's songwriting in The Cure has long focused on melancholic and dark themes. But on the band's highly anticipated upcoming album, Songs of a Lost World (Nov. 1), takes on a slice of real heartbreak that he said inspired him to pay tribute to his late brother. In a nearly two-hour interview with British journalist Matt Everitt — which can be unlocked by looking up the album's release date in Latin numbers here — Smith explains the origin of “I Can Never Say Goodbye.”
“I wrote this song in a lot of different ways, until I got it down to a very simple account of what really happened the night he died,” he said of the song dedicated to his late older brother, Richard, while also a member of the Cure's. songs that always have an edge of “moral dread”. “It went all over the house and I went everywhere with that song to sum up how I felt. In the end, it turned into a rather bleak little vignette.”
The singer said he struggled to balance the “outpouring” of emotion he was feeling at the time with the need to write a cohesive song, admitting that some earlier versions of the song were “too cramped” for general consumption. For the record, she loved them, but other people suggested the evening was “too much.” In fact, when Smith, 65, performed “Goodbye” live on the Cure's 2023 tour, he said he had trouble not going over the top and getting emotional at the concert.
Smith continued, “I wrote the song about it and the music itself was what I wanted to breathe. I didn't want the words to dominate the song, in a way that the music can become a background to what you're singing. In that, I think the music is more important than what I'm singing in a way. It's a very difficult song to say. People say “laxative” a lot, but it was. It allowed me to deal with it and I think it helped me a lot.”
Realizing he doesn't have “that many more albums” in his future, Smith said he wanted his new songs to “mean something”, unlike some of the Cure's earlier songs which he said weren't as personal. “On this album everything matters [to me],” he said of songs like “I Can Never Say Goodbye,” which finds him singing, “Something bad comes this way/ To steal my brother's life/ Something bad comes this way/ I could never say goodbye.”
“When you're younger, you romanticize [death]even without knowing it. Then it starts happening to your family and friends and suddenly it's different. It's something I struggled with lyrically: how do I put that into the songs? I feel like I'm a different person than when we last made an album. I wanted this to happen.”
Songs of a Lost World is the long-awaited follow-up to 2008's Cure 4:13 Dream; So far the group has previewed the LP with the songs “A Fragile Thing”, as well as “Alone”.
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/music/rock/the-cure-robert-smith-writing-brother-death-i-can-never-say-goodbye-1235799640/
