This has long been a moving song for me, but the meaning was a bit ambiguous, so my unconscious mind morphed it into something that had personal meaning for me, but I'm seeing now was not quite accurate. Seeing the printed lyrics above for the first time, the capitalized Him gives it away. It is apparently about an infant who died. I always thought it may have been about a teen who died or rather ran away and disappeared, possibly even a teen suicide, and the "him" (other than the "He took you" part) was he who died. I heard the one verse as "And it made your momma cry", and it made sense to me on that level. This was also before I knew the title was "Song for Emma".
Not at all to detract from Mr. Walsh's awesome lyrics and the story they tell, I think "we told him 'we love you'/we hope somehow he heard" as a standalone lyric could be very intensely moving when you apply it to notion of a young person who disappeared, got into drugs, became mentally ill living somewhere on the streets, etc. The one problem with this notion is that if the parents were loving enough to cry out "we hope he heard", chances are that their child would not have ended up in such a dire predicament, but sometimes events conspire against even the most loving families.
This has long been a moving song for me, but the meaning was a bit ambiguous, so my unconscious mind morphed it into something that had personal meaning for me, but I'm seeing now was not quite accurate. Seeing the printed lyrics above for the first time, the capitalized Him gives it away. It is apparently about an infant who died. I always thought it may have been about a teen who died or rather ran away and disappeared, possibly even a teen suicide, and the "him" (other than the "He took you" part) was he who died. I heard the one verse as "And it made your momma cry", and it made sense to me on that level. This was also before I knew the title was "Song for Emma".
Not at all to detract from Mr. Walsh's awesome lyrics and the story they tell, I think "we told him 'we love you'/we hope somehow he heard" as a standalone lyric could be very intensely moving when you apply it to notion of a young person who disappeared, got into drugs, became mentally ill living somewhere on the streets, etc. The one problem with this notion is that if the parents were loving enough to cry out "we hope he heard", chances are that their child would not have ended up in such a dire predicament, but sometimes events conspire against even the most loving families.