I Wanna Learn a Love Song by Harry Chapin (1974)

I Wanna Learn a Love Song

written by Harry Chapin

I come fresh from the street, fast on my feet
Kind of lean and lazy, not much meat on my bones
And a whole lot alone, and more than a little bit crazy
The old six-string was all I had to keep my belly still
And for each full hour lesson I gave, I got a crisp ten-dollar bill

She was married for seven years to a concrete castle king
She said she wanted to learn to play the guitar, and to hear her children sing
So, I’d show up for about once a week, in my faded tight legged jeans
With a backlog full of hobo stories and dilapidated dreams

She said, “I want to learn a love song full of happy things”
She said, “I want to learn a love song, won’t you let me hear you sing?”
She said, “I want to learn a love song, I want to hear you play”
She said, “I, I want to learn a love song before you go away”

So, I tried to teach her a couple of chords and an easy melody
But it always turned out, she’d rather listen to my guitar and me
I could hear her old man laughing in the den, playing stud poker with the boys
While I sang so soft in the living room, too scared to make much noise

I came one week, and the den was dark, and she met me at the door
And we sat on the couch, and we sang and talked until I could not sing no more
The silence kept on building, her eyes grew much too wide
And I could hear both of our heartbeats, but there was no place to hide

(chorus)

Well, I guess you know what happened, God, I, I never been so clean
Yes, I feel like I’m working in a Hollywood movie, or living out a good bad dream
All them pin-up girls in that tinsel world never touched me like she can
It took another man’s wife, in the real world life
To make this boy a man

(chorus)

I guess you know I stayed

Most casual listeners will only know Harry Chapin as the “Cat’s in the Cradle” musician, but the Grammy-winning and Hall of Fame inductee had written over 100 songs over 11 albums, until his death in 1981.

There’s no denying that “Cat’s in the Cradle” is Chapin’s signature song, and is relatable by anyone, who is too busy working to spend time with their family. Thanks to the hit single, Elektra Records was able to sell over 2.5 million copies of the 1974 album Verities and Balderdash.

All this was a little before my time, and I was gifted the album by my sixth-grade teacher, who was an avid fan. As the title suggests, this album contains important (vertities) and nonsense (balderdash) songs… in other words, a mishmash collection.

There are some gems on the record, including my personal favorite, “30,000 Pounds of Bananas”, which is much better when performed live.

The other song I liked is “I Wanna Learn a Love Song,” a song about Harry Chapin met his wife, Sandra. I didn’t know this at the time, and had always assumed that he got the idea from one of his passengers when he was a Taxi driver. That’s the case of “30,000 Pounds…”, which was a story he’s heard on a bus to Scranton, Pennsylvania.

According to “I Wanna Learn a Love Song,” Chapin was hobo who was earning $10 every week by teaching songwriting with his old six-string (which I misheard the lyrics as “the old six train”).

Notably, when “I Wanna Learn a Love Song” is played live, Chapin would change up the lyrics, instead of “a little bit crazy”, he would replace the lyrics with “more than a bit horny” (with a clown horn right after to punctuate the line). It’s clearly one of his favorite songs to perform live.

A demo version of this exists as “Simple Song” (which you can hear on YouTube), but it got re-worked with a different chorus, from learning a simple song to learning a love song. The song was removed from the album Sniper and Other Love Songs in 1972. Eventually, the song resurfaced in 2004, when they re-released it as a double album in the UK.

Country singer Donna Fargo covered the song, but re-wrote it from the woman’s point of view, retitled as “I Want To Learn A Love Song”.

Sample of the re-worked lyrics:

I’d been married for seven long years to a concrete castle king
I decided to learn to play the guitar, just to hear my children sing

vu ♥ weheartmusic.com ♥ twitter.com/weheartmusic