She’s Got Better Days Than Nights

    It is funny how meaning can be lost in translation. It is even more funny when a new meaning is imagined to replace it.

    I was around 9 years old, living in Santiago de Chile, when I first heard the song ‟She’s Got Bette Davis Eyes,” a great song by the American singer Kim Carnes. I did not speak English at the time, so I could not understand any of the lyrics.

    There is a certain beauty to listening to music without understanding the lyrics. It wraps the song in an aura of mystery, and one wonders what the artist is singing about that needs to be expressed with such music. My love for Classical music is in part because of this - pure music unadulterated by lyrics.

    As I grew up I learned and became fluent in English, and when I re-listened to the 80s songs I had grown up with I was disappointed that, basically, every song talks about wanting to get laid. Lame. That is when I turned to Pink Floyd, who sung about deep personal existential angst which matched my teenage mood.

    And yet, once understanding English, I still misunderstood certain songs, which takes us back to Kim Carnes. There was no way that I could have known that the words ‘Bette’ and ‘Davis’ existed, let alone that they were personal names. I also could not have known that Bette Davis was an actress from the black and white era, and an amazing one at that, I came to find out the day I sat to watch one of her many movies, ‟All About Eve,” from 1950. This movie, funny enough, and without me having known it, closely resembles the plot of my book VIVIANA, which you can read by clicking on the icon at the top of this blog site ;)

    Anyway, the title verse, ‟She’s got Bette Davis Eyes,” means that the abstract ‟She” in the song is as sexy as the actress of old. Yet in my limited English I understood it as being, ‟She’s got better days than night.”

    And the hilarious confusion only started there. Since the whole song praises the sensuality of the abstract ‟She,” I thought that ‟She” was a prostitute. Oops!

    It was a sad song for me really, because I imagined this woman dressing herself up and behaving sensually to attract clients. She spent the whole night whoring, I imagined, and it killed her inside. So when she was awake in the daytime, she was more calm because she was not prostituting herself. Hence, ‟She had better days than nights.”

    It is a funny confusion, but you can see how misinterpreting one sentence gave the entire text a different meaning. Anyhow, this is a great song, one I recently learned to play on the piano, and I invite you to listen to it gain with the misinterpreted verse in mind.

Search: Kim Carnes - Bette Davis Eyes.

I will add the link below and we’ll see how long it stays until it is taken down by copyright fiends.

PS: ‟She’s pure as New York snow.” Really? I lived in New York for over four winters, including one when there was a brutal snow storm that brought the city to a halt, and let me tell you one thing: ‟New York snow,” is only as pure as the night when it falls. The next day it is pilled along the side walks gray and brown with grime and dirt. Not pure at all, Kim, not pure at all.