Embrace Me, You Child, by Carly Simon [Updated]

Pay no mind to the photographs, at least so far as the song is concerned.




Uploaded by americanmanhood.


I left the following note to the fellow who uploaded the song.

Thank you for uploading this powerful song, in which a youngish woman (Carly Simon) says goodbye to her dead father, and muses about him, God, the relationship of the two, and her knowledge of God through her father.

Unfortunately, you have chosen to turn this posting into a photo album about boys and their mothers. The photographs are lovely, but what do they have to do with the song?

(Postscript, Thursday, October 11, 2012, 10:13 p.m.: I just checked the Youtube page for this upload, and the mook did not post my comment. Every comment he did post was worshipful in its praise.

There's just no happy medium at Youtube. Pages where no one moderates the comments are typically free-for-alls dominated by pottymouthed morons, while people who moderate their pages have, in my experience, zero tolerance for criticism, however muted.)


Embrace Me, You Child
Words & Music by Carly Simon

At night I heard God whisper lullabies,
While Daddy next door whistled whisky tunes,
Sometimes when I wanted, they would harmonize,
There was nothing those two couldn’t do.

“Embrace me, you child, you're a child of mine,
“And I'm leaving everything I am to you,
“Go chase the wild and nighttime streets,” sang Daddy,
And God sang, “Pray, the Devil doesn't get to you.”

I thought together they must sing the moon away,
I thought that they must know each other well,
For the magic that they made, when they played,
Wasn’t lost between their Heaven and their Hell.

“Embrace me, you child, you're a child of mine,
“And I'm leaving everything I am to you,
“Go chase the wild and nighttime streets,” sang Daddy,
And God sang, “Pray, the Devil doesn't get to you.”

Then one night Daddy died, and went to Heaven,
And God came down to earth, and slipped away,
I pretended not to know, I’d been abandoned,
But no one sang the night into the day.

And later nighttime songs came back again,
But the singers don’t compare with those I knew,
And I never figured out where God and Daddy went,
But there was nothing those two couldn’t do.

“Embrace me, you child, you're a child of mine,
“And I'm leaving everything I am to you,
“Go chase the wild and nighttime streets,” sang Daddy,
And God sang, “Pray, the Devil doesn't get to you.”


(I find the song both powerful and clunky. In particular, I believe the line,

“While Daddy next door whistled whisky tunes,” should be changed to,

While next door Daddy whistled whisky tunes.)


I used this song in some of my college classes, teaching remedial composition and philosophy. In English Comp, I would sometimes use the song as a diagnostic tool on the first or second day of class. (More often, I would use “Is That All There is?”) I would hand out photocopies of the lyrics, sing them to my students, and then have them write an essay analyzing the song.

The lyrics are so simple, and the sentiment so elemental, that unless someone is completely illiterate, he has to be able to understand the song. The essay got me inside each student’s head, and permitted me to determine his literacy and intelligence levels.

The smarter students made observations on the relationships between the characters in the song; the dullards merely repeated the lyrics, as if quotation were analysis.

On the rare occasion in which I got to teach philosophy, I used this song for my lecture on the philosophy of religion. The first time I did that precluded my being permitted to teach philosophy again—as opposed to remedial reading—at that particular community college.

I was going to be evaluated, and put together a special production for the occasion, which is what you’re supposed to do. Unfortunately, my evaluator was a smug atheist, who, for some strange reason, had fled New York City for the New Jersey suburbs.

During the break in the evening class, I said something to her about some people not being open to talking about the subject matter, to which she responded, “How can you talk about what doesn’t exist.”

She gave me a condescendingly mediocre evaluation, as political retaliation, claiming that I wasn’t as good a teacher as I was a philosopher.

Using a pop song to elucidate a metaphysical problem made me a failure as a teacher? That is exactly what that woman’s “progressive” pedagogy would have called for, only “progressives” have no pedagogy; they only have politics. Push their politics, and you’re a “brilliant” teacher. Fail to tow the line politically, and you’re somehow pedagogically inept.