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If you, gentle reader, can feel anything other than a nagging despair at the speaker’s extreme tardiness in locating the moment of his error, then you are stronger than I am. While “...and lied” at the end of the verse finally homes in on where the plaintive speaker went wrong, it’s too little and far too late: the song, after all, is called “the Call,” not “the Lie,” and the first line of the song indicates that it’s the phone call and not the content thereof that changed the life of the man who made it. If this seems like a precious point, ask yourself this: would things have gone differently if the speaker hadn’t made the call? Of course not; the lamented relationship ended when “One of her friends found out/that she wasn’t my only one.” Whether the friend’s discovery was somehow related to the phone call (whose simulation we are subjected to no fewer than three times during the song) is left to the listener’s imagination. Perhaps it was; perhaps it wasn’t. Who knows? We don’t. We can’t. The speaker, however, will never escape his prison of regret, because it’s his belief that his error was calling up to make an excuse for not coming home on time, and that his infidelity is hardly even worth mentioning except in passing. | |
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