What’s in a Song: I Get Along Without You Very Well
(Part 1)

[Another in an occasional series on popular songs with appeal across the generations. This post will be broken into two parts; Part 2, about this song's composition, appears tomorrow [edit to add:] or the next day Thursday.]

There’s a trick performed by some songwriters — I don’t know the term for it, if there is one — in which they “overstuff” their lyrics’ lines with extra syllables.

This is similar to what, in poetry, is called sprung rhythm: “verse” which mimics the rhythm of natural speech.

It also calls to mind a sly little bit of business by Alexander Pope. In demonstrating the awkwardness of so-called alexandrine meter — twelve syllables per line — Pope once, as Wikipedia says, “famously characterized the alexandrine’s potential to slow or speed the flow of a poem in two rhyming couplets consisting of an iambic pentameter followed by an alexandrine.” One of these two couplets goes:

A needless alexandrine ends the song
that like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

See the way that second line seems overloaded with syllables? That’s pretty much the idea I’m getting at here.

In a song, though, the effect can be either subtler or more ponderous, as the words follow the underlying instrumentation — and depending on the singer’s skill. It’s not like we’re just reading the words on a page, free to imagine, if we want, that the line breaks and meter don’t count at all: it has to “sound right.”

So let’s start out with the lyrics, then, to “I Get Along Without You Very Well” (Hoagy Carmichael*, 1939):

I get along without you very well,
Of course I do,
Except when soft rains fall
And drip from leaves, then I recall
The thrill of being sheltered in your arms.
Of course, I do.
But I get along without you very well.

I’ve forgotten you just like I should,
Of course I have,
Except to hear your name,
Or someone’s laugh that is the same,
But I’ve forgotten you just like I should.

What a guy, what a fool am I.
To think my breaking heart could kid the moon.
What’s in store? Should I phone once more?
No, it’s best that I stick to my tune.

I get along without you very well,
Of course I do.
Except perhaps in spring.
But I should never think of spring,
For that would surely break my heart in two.

Where’s the overstuffing? It starts out right at the beginning. In a conventional pop song, that line would run something like this:

I get along without you well

The insertion of very‘s two syllables throws the whole thing off. When we hit line 5 (“The thrill of being sheltered in your arms”), the meter seems on the brink of unraveling altogether.

What kind of melody could possibly follow along with this sort of hiccup (which continues throughout the song)? More importantly, how is a singer supposed to handle it?

The biggest hit version of “I Get Along Without You Very Well” came from Red Norvo’s band, in 1939. And the song got wide exposure in a 1952 film, The Las Vegas Story, in which Carmichael himself (with Jane Russell!) performed it.

One hit recording was Rosemary Clooney’s, in 1961; here’s her version.

(As always with this little audio-player thing: click the Play button to start; volume control — visible once the song begins — is at the left, in a little row of vertical bars.)

This version is unlike most you’ll hear, in the swinging-Big-Band treatment which kicks in after the first couple lines. The riffing brass throughout, the trumpet solo at not quite the two-minute mark: if you don’t know the lyrics and aren’t paying attention, musically this almost comes across as a cheery “I Get a Kick Out of You” upbeat song. You almost expect to hear her exclaim, Ring-a-ding-ding!

Now, before proceeding, and as I often say here when discussing art and music: I have no credentials to discuss such things.

But it seems to me that some singers handle the overstuffing, this sort of fooling-around-with-the-meter, just fine. Sinatra did it a lot, successfully, as do many performers in the cabaret/chanteuse mold: they improvise, scat, or just sort of doodle (intelligibly or otherwise) between words and phrases. A penchant for singing in a way that resembles melodic speech seems to help.

Which brings me to Carly Simon.

In the mid-1980s, I fell completely, utterly in love — in a way that I expect I will never fall in love again. (If you are The Missus, I apologize if this comes as a shock.) I fell in love with a note, a single musical note, as sung by Carly Simon. The album was 1981′s Torch, which included covers of old torch songs (hence the title) and some new ones as well. (I’ve written about that album before — obviously a favorite.)

And the note in question was the last syllable of “I Get Along Without You Very Well.”

Simon’s interpretation has much in common with many others: the narrator of this story believes herself free of the influence, free of the pull of her ex-lover. But merely telling you the story and merely asserting her new-found “freedom” brings the pain flooding back. Other singers have picked up on that irony and made their voices bend around it, agonizingly.

But Carly Simon’s plaintive (almost nasal) voice is especially well suited to expressing this sort of heartbreak: this is almost like eavesdropping on an internal monologue. It’s wracked, not with guilt but sure as hell with something.

And when she hits that final “tooooooo” — which trails off for almost a half-minute — it’s like watching a cloud of hopefulness evaporate, like watching someone you love fall into a bleak forlorn future. To this day, I think it’s one of the most perfect notes I’ve ever heard from a singer: pitch-perfect musically, sure, but (more importantly, more uncommonly, more rarely) pitch-perfect in its soul.

Here’s Carly Simon:

In Part 2 of this post, tomorrow [edit to add:] or the next day, I’ll get away from all this about overstuffed lyrics and heartbreak-bent voices. There, I’ll cover the semi-famous history of the composition of “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” in which legend tells a pretty and tragic tale… but reality seems more muddled.
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* They don’t make names like this anymore. It’s short for Hoagland. My favorite Hoagy Carmichael trivia is from his biography by Richard M. Sudhalter, Stardust Melody:

When… Ian Fleming published his first James Bond Novel, Casino Royale, he had fellow-agent René Mathis describe the suave, amoral Bond as “very good-looking. He reminds me rather of Hoagy Carmichael, but there is something cold and ruthless in his” — at which point an explosion shatters the window of the office in which the conversation is taking place. The description is left unfinished. Later in the novel Bond examines his reflection in a mirror and concludes, “Not much of Hoagy Carmichael there.”

Look at that picture at the top of this post. You can see it, hmm? Based on looks alone, probably the only film Bond who approached this “look” was the otherwise unremarkable George Lazenby.