Cry Baby Cry Lyrics
Make your mother sigh
She's old enough to know better
The king of Marigold was in the kitchen
Cooking breakfast for the queen
The queen was in the parlor
Playing piano for the children of the king
Cry baby cry
Make your mother sigh
She's old enough to know better
So cry baby cry
The king was in the garden
Picking flowers for a friend who came to play
The queen was in the playroom
Painting pictures for the children's holiday
Cry baby cry
Make your mother sigh
She's old enough to know better
So cry baby cry
The duchess of Kirkcaldy always smiling
Arriving late for tea
The duke was having problems
With a message the local bird and bee
Cry baby cry
Make your mother sigh
She's old enough to know better
So cry baby cry
At twelve o'clock a meeting round the table
For a seance in the dark
With voices out of nowhere
Put on especially by the children for a lark
Cry baby cry
Make your mother sigh
She's old enough to know better
So cry baby cry, cry, cry, cry baby
Make your mother sigh
She's old enough to know better
Cry baby cry, cry, cry, cry
Make your mother sigh
She's old enough to know better
So cry baby cry
Although the comment about the children being ghosts seems plausible, I personally feel as though the comments about the disconnected family are correct. I agree with the fact that the way the king and queen are spoken of makes it appear that they are supressing their emotions about the king's obvious affair with the Duchess of Kircaldy, which is made even more apparent with the line implying the duke is sexually inadequate in some way (The duke was having problems/With a message the local "bird and bee".) The rest of the comments about emotional supression make the most sense to me. I think the baby, although it may actually be a child of the king and queen, represents all the characters in the song, who ultimately represent a lot of people in real life.
The other comment about the ending of the song makes a lot of sense to me too, about how they wish to go back to times much simpler than the one they lived at the time, battling drug addictions and various prominent issues they must have been having in their lives.
I wish we could go back and ask John what he intended this song to mean, though. I'm a teenager now, and like others said I was greatly impacted by the song for a reason I could not explain when I first heard it. It made my heart ache and I wasn't sure why, which was amazing.
bird and bee is english slang for bed and breakfast
bird and bee is english slang for bed and breakfast
This song is actually wrtten around the nusery rhyme, 'Sing A Song of Sixpence', which I think his mother use to read to him (John). I think in this song he is earning for his mum...'can you take me back where I came back'. Personally I dont really know what this song means to me, except everytime I here it, I sort of just stop and have a think.
I agree with razjac on this one, since I heard it for the first time when I was fourteen. For some reason, it evoked the image of a vicious girl I met recently who had to have her way with everything...even other guys. I wished she got what she deserved, and this song's chorus seemed to be doling out her punishment.
i always thought that the song was about a wife and a husband fighting...thats why they keep calling the other children the queens children or the kings children but never their own.
@SOAD is my world WOW... I'm a little shocked I never stopped to think of these royal appellations as a "distancing" effect in a middle-class family. Awesome, and thanks!
@SOAD is my world WOW... I'm a little shocked I never stopped to think of these royal appellations as a "distancing" effect in a middle-class family. Awesome, and thanks!
This song's been a favourite of mine for years, however it's meaning I've always found elusive - until today! A lightbulb suddenly switched on in my head and suddenly I realised:
THE CHILDREN ARE GHOSTS!
That explains why their parents can't hear them until the "seance" where the children make noises "for a lark". The mother can't accept their loss so continues to "play piano" and "paint pictures" for them. The chorus of the song is a reassurance to the children not to feel to bad about frightening their mother during the seance as "she's old enough to know better" - presumably, to know better than to dabble in such practices. The final "can you take me back" could either be the children's desire to return to the land of the living, or the mother's desire to turn back the clock.
i read that john liked alice in wonderland.i can't help but think that the baby is the pig-baby from the book. sounds nonsense,huh?
I do like these theories a lot, but I do feel it's a little different. I feel as though the queen had an affair with another man, and the Dutchess of Kircaldy is the only one who knows, and the baby, most likely two or three, was in the room in his cradle when it happened. The queen is becoming more and more detached from her husband as she tries to draw his concern away from the baby, and the Dutchess keeps letting the word out. (Ex. The Duke was having problems with the message at the local "Bird and Bee". Perhaps she told the Duke and he was telling others while he was at the bar, but the message got mixed up? Mixed messages do happen a lot.) Near the end, at the seance, I believe the mischievous children said what they heard their baby brother say about the affair. (they were probably under the table, not dead.) The King, obviously ticked off, goes off and probably executed the man involved with the affair as his wife begs him not to do it, just to go back to simpler times.
this song is really interesting. it's about a lot of people, all related, and what goes on that they don't know about. and that at some point we all do stuff that makes our mother sigh.
This song moved me very much when I first heard it as a young teenager. I think it's about about something Henry David Thoreau called "quiet desperation." It's sort of a theme that John was getting ramped up to further explore, some might say a bit obsessively, after the Beatles' breakup. In particular, there's a [Wilhelm] Reichian feel to it, tinged with a sense of whole-body, organic loss. The general mood is dark and tragic. Something is missing in these peoples' lives. They're trying to carry on normally, including being dutifully loving to family and engaging in neurotic, distracting pasttimes (the children acting out by holding a seance, looking for solace in another "world"), but they will all eventually regret not digging in and coming to terms with that sadness deep in their hearts. It's interesting to note that a person might reasonably not come to a conclusion like this one, just reading the lyrics and not hearing the recording. I believe this is a great case for the view that, with the greatest songs, interpretation of the lyric can't be abstracted from the total product. I think the production on this number very much contributes to this interpretation. The ponderous, thumping beat, to me, conveys the sense of life as a laborious, straightjacketed affair, which is a good way of describing people under emotional constriction.
Maybe about human nature???