re: The Wait Is Over. The Cure Announce the Release of "Alone" First New Single in 16 years

quote:

---

“Alone” calls back to the 1989 album Disintegration and the 2000 album Bloodflowers with its captivating chord sequence, slow and gloomy progression, and ruminative lyrics. Robert Smith’s voice hasn’t aged in the slightest as he kicks off the first verse:

This is the end of every song that we sing
The fire burned out to ash and the stars grown dim with tears
Cold and afraid, the ghosts of all that we’ve been
We toast, with bitter dregs, to our emptiness

The lyrics pay homage to “Dregs” by Ernest Christopher Dowson, a poem exploring themes like grief, death, and loneliness. You know, the usual.
“It’s the track that unlocked the record; as soon as we had that piece of music recorded I knew it was the opening song, and I felt the whole album come into focus,” Smith said in a press release.
“I had been struggling to find the right opening line for the right opening song for a while, working with the simple idea of ‘being alone’, always in the back of my mind this nagging feeling that I already knew what the opening line should be… as soon as we finished recording I remembered the poem ‘Dregs’ by the English poet Ernest Dowson… and that was the moment when I knew the song—and the album—were real.”

Dregs

The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof,
(This is the end of every song man sings!)
The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain,
Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain;
And health and hope have gone the way of love
Into the drear oblivion of lost things.
Ghosts go along with us until the end;
This was a mistress, this, perhaps, a friend.
With pale, indifferent eyes, we sit and wait
For the dropped curtain and the closing gate:
This is the end of all the songs man sings.

---

quote:

---

It just released

---