Winning When You’re Losing Or Sundown’s Dissonance
16th January 2012
Today’s persuasion lesson comes to us from the Bard of Canada, Gordon Lightfoot, and his musical consideration of love, lust, and mistrust, and how they combine into dissonance with Sundown (YouTube video). The song, Sundown, is about the woman a man cannot resist even though he knows better.
I can see her lying back in her satin dress
In a room where you do what you don’t confess
Sundown, you better take care
If I find you been creeping ’round my back stairs
Sundown is probably not the name of the Woman – what Siren in a satin dress would creep anywhere or anytime – but most likely is another man in pursuit of the unnamed Woman who is loved by the Narrator of the song. If Sundown is another man, not the Narrator, we realize that the Woman in the satin dress has been with Sundown doing what should not be confessed to the Narrator. Sundown comes creeping ’round the back stairs of the Narrator’s place. We’ve got the classic love triangle with the Woman cheating on the Narrator with Sundown.
The Narrator now reminds us of how desirable the Woman is and more importantly of Her persuasion skills.
She’s been looking like a queen in a sailor’s dream
And she don’t always say what she really means
The Woman is irresistible. She’s also inSincere and persuasive which leads to aversive consequences for the Narrator: Other men, like Sundown, come creeping around back stairs finding the Woman in her satin dress. This leads to our persuasion lesson.
Sometimes I think it’s a sin
When I feel like I’m winning when I’m losing again
That lyric is a poetic way to describe dissonance and its reduction. When things get worse and yet you feel better, you’re in the throes of dissonance. Or as Lightfoot puts it:
I feel like I’m winning when I’m losing again.
He loves and wants the Woman all the more even though She is cheating on the Narrator with Sundown. What seals this interpretation is the repeated refrain.
Sundown, you better take care
If I find you been creeping ’round my back stairs
If the Narrator did not love the Queen in the Satin Dress, then Sundown could visit Her through the front door. Yet the Narrator warns Sundown about creeping at the back stairs. The Narrator is wary, alert, and vigilant which means He loves the Woman. We know this from:
I can picture every move a man can make
Getting lost in her loving is his first mistake
Perhaps the Narrator realizes that Sundown loves the Woman as much as He does. But the Narrator’s love for Her drives dissonance – I want what gives me pain – and leads to the pursuit of dissonance reduction. The more the Narrator suspects He is losing (He fails to catch Sundown), He feels like He’s winning (He loves the Woman even more and redoubles his wary watch).
Dissonance proves why Peithos sat as the handmaiden to Aphrodite in Greek mythology. Sometimes the persuasion is as obvious as arguing for the bigger dowry in an arranged marriage and sometimes it is the mad love from dissonance.
P.S. For guitar players out there, Sundown is surprisingly easy in structure. It’s E (2-2-4), B (2-4-2), A, and D with a solo in the pentatonic E minor just varying on the octave. Lightfoot slapped a capo up the neck depending upon, I’d guess, his voice at that moment. As Clapton once said, “It’s just patterns, man.” That and those fingers.