People love to wallow, which explains why songs like “Alone Again (Naturally),” a No. 1 hit by Gilbert O’Sullivan in 1971, garner such attention. It’s not enough, of course, to just pile up a laundry list of troubles in a song and hope it succeeds.
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You have to know how to structure the heartbreak, musically and lyrically, so a mass audience wants to hear it again. O’Sullivan handled that task as well as anyone could have hoped on his biggest hit, which is why “Alone Again (Naturally)” still sustains as one of pop music’s most affecting downers.
What’s Eating Gilbert?
He was born in Ireland as Raymond O’Sullivan (the stage name Gilbert was later suggested to him as a play on those masters of the operetta, Gilbert and Sullivan). At a young age, his family moved to Great Britain and O’Sullivan became adept as a piano player, which led him to eventually seek out a career as a singer/songwriter in the late ’60s.
His first big break was when he was signed to a label run by Gordon Mills, whose stable of artists included Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck. Neither of those men wrote their own material, so O’Sullivan was a bit of a different act for Mills. The manager/producer encouraged the artist to churn out songs, but he couldn’t prevail upon O’Sullivan to modernize his old-timey look.
That didn’t stop him from succeeding almost right off the bat in the UK. His 1970 single “Nothing Rhymed,” featuring O’Sullivan’s heavy-handed piano style and crooning vocals, shot to the Top 10 in the United Kingdom.
Although none of the singles off his first album Himself (1971) charted in America, the album still hit the Top 10 in the U.S. at the height of the singer/songwriter craze. That gave O’Sullivan the momentum needed to set himself up for a breakout. “Alone Again (Naturally)” delivered on that promise, hitting No. 1 in the U.S. in 1972.
Many people assumed the song was somehow autobiographical, so haunting was the tale. About the only similarity between the events of the song and O’Sullivan’s life was the death of the protagonist’s father. Even that was embellished a bit, as O’Sullivan didn’t have much of a relationship with his own father, meaning the death didn’t affect him in the way the song’s narrator struggles.
Behind the Meaning of “Alone Again (Naturally)”
Because of the benign, McCartney-esque melody and O’Sullivan’s restrained vocals, you can easily miss just how dark it gets in “Alone Again (Naturally).” Look at that first verse again, and you won’t doubt it. The narrator decides to treat myself / And visit a nearby tower / Where climbing to the top / Will throw myself off.
Why is he in such a state? The second verse explains: Left standing in the lurch at a church / Were people saying, My God, that’s tough / She stood him up. Being stranded at the altar eradicates all faith: Talk about, God in his mercy / Oh if he really does exist / Why did he desert me.
The narrator uses the bridge to show empathy for others who are going through their own times before he turns back to his own tale in the final stanza and details even more tragedy. His father dies, creating a domino effect, eventually claiming the life of his mother: Couldn’t understand why the only man / She had ever loved had been taken.
The title of “Alone Again (Naturally”), which Gilbert O’Sullivan repeats at the end of every verse of this moving song, is a kind of shoulder shrug, the narrator’s way of coping with all that’s been piled on top of him. But there’s nothing natural or routine about the way O’Sullivan caresses this sad story, which is why audiences have been diving in and tearing up about it for decades.
Photo by Watal Asanuma/Shinko Music/Getty Images
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