Turn down the lights
Turn down the bed
Turn down these voices inside my head
Lay down with me, tell me no lies
Just hold me close, don’t patronize
Don’t patronize me.
Cause I can’t make you love me if you don’t
You can’t make your heart feel something it won’t
Here in the dark, in these final hours
I will lay down my heart and I’ll feel the power
But you won’t, no you won’t
Cause I can’t make you love me if you don’t
I’ll close my eyes, then I won’t see
The love you don’t feel when you’re holding me
Morning will come and I’ll do what’s right
Just give me till then to give up this fight
And I will give up this fight
Cause I can’t make you love me if you don’t
You can’t make your heart feel something it won’t
Here in the dark, in these final hours
I will lay down my heart and I’ll feel the power
But you won’t, no you won’t
Cause I can’t make you love me if you don’t
Bonnie Raitt I Can’t Make You Love Me
Every time I hear this, it always gives me goosebumps and brings me back to Winter 1991, in the grey gloomy kitchen of my first apartment in Corona, NY. It was a humble barely-furnished 1-BR, shared amongst three housemates, and we all slept on mattresses off the floor all in the same room. Our furniture, whatever little we had, were all picked up off the street; chairs and mattresses that neighbors were throwing away and chucked on the sidewalk. Our dining table, if you can even call it that, was a piece of wooden board propped on top of a milk crate and we’d all sit cross-legged on the floor whenever we ate. We cooked a big pot of oxtail soup often, because oxtail was priced at only 99¢ a bag at the supermarket. Cheap grub, but hearty and satisfying.
Humble beginnings, you can say. Starving art student lifestyle; that’s what it was like for me in the early nineties. This song was streaming through the radio at the time and I remember the room was freezing. It was always cold for me in NY whenever winter hit. It was a ghetto life but we all got by alright. :)
♫ Soundtrack of My Life
