Bill Withers / + 'Justments / 1974
Can We Pretend
wistful, guarded, quietly desperate
Video: Bill Withers - Topic on YouTube
Lyrics
Can we pretend
That from now on
There is no yesterday
Paint a portrait of tomorrow
With no colors from today
There's a light that shines in your face sometimes
That takes my feelings, wraps them around your knee
Showing 7 of 22 lines -- this excerpt supports the analysis alongside it. Read the full lyric on Genius.
Lyrics via LRCLIB (community-contributed). Rights remain with the songwriters and publishers.
Credits
Written by Denise Nicholas
Produced by Bill Withers, James Gadson, Melvin Dunlap
Credits via Genius
Timed (LRC) version available
A synced lyric was found for this track and is stored with the record.
The analysis
A wounded plea for a fresh start with a partner whose affection is unreliable, built almost entirely around one conditional question: can the past simply be erased. The song never answers itself, and its repetition becomes an admission that the wish is not working.
conditional love emotional ambivalence denial as coping asking for reconciliation doubt beneath hope
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses a partner directly, using 'we' to propose a mutual erasure of history that seems to be his idea alone; the tone suggests he doesn't fully believe what he's proposing, which makes him a sympathetic but self-aware unreliable optimist.
What happens
The song opens with a hypothetical bargain: forget yesterday, imagine a clean tomorrow. The middle sections complicate that wish by describing the partner's inconsistency, alternating warmth and withdrawal. The final repetition of the refrain, stripped of new imagery, suggests the narrator is left only with the question itself, unresolved and unanswered.
How it's built
The song is built on a verse-refrain pattern that never develops into a bridge or resolution; instead it circles back to the same conditional phrase. The refrain's repetition without variation at the end mimics the narrator's inability to move past his own request, turning form into content.
Section by section
Opening verse
The narrator proposes erasing yesterday and reimagining tomorrow without reference to today's pain, setting up the song's central conditional and its inherent contradiction—you cannot logically build a future portrait without any color from the present.
First refrain
Describes the partner in fluctuating terms: warmth that draws the narrator close, then a hidden shadow that reverses the feeling and sends it back inward. This creates the emotional logic for why pretending feels necessary.
Second verse
Repeats the pretending request but escalates the imagery to 'bright and gay' colors, revealing a more forced optimism, as though repetition is meant to convince himself rather than describe reality.
Second refrain
Identical to the first, its return without change signals that nothing has actually shifted between the two attempts at reconciliation.
Outro
The refrain collapses into bare repetition of the title phrase alone, without narrative or metaphor, suggesting exhaustion — the argument has run out and only the wish remains.
Craft
- extended metaphor (painting)
- The image of painting tomorrow's portrait with or without colors from today represents selective memory and the impossibility of truly separating past from present.
- light/shadow imagery
- The partner's affection and withdrawal are cast as light and shadow on the face and in the heart, visualizing emotional inconsistency without stating it directly.
- anaphora
- The repeated opening phrase 'Can we pretend' structures each verse and dominates the outro, reinforcing the plea's obsessive, unresolved quality.
- internalized turn
- The description of feelings turning back on the narrator suggests self-doubt or self-blame folded into the description of the partner's coldness, blurring where the hurt originates.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a portrait of someone trying to will himself out of heartbreak through denial, aware even as he asks that the request is unrealistic — the unanswered, repetitive ending enacts that failure formally. An alternative reading takes the pretending literally as a proposal for a genuine fresh start in a salvageable relationship, with the light/shadow imagery describing ordinary human complexity rather than dysfunction; under that view the ending is open rather than defeated. The text supports both, though the total absence of resolution and the flattening repetition tilt toward the former.
Context
'+'Justments' followed 'Still Bill' and came after contractual and personal friction between Withers and his label, though I don't have reliable specifics about this song's own writing circumstances and won't speculate about them. Musically Withers's catalog from this period is known for spare, conversational soul arrangements that mirror the plain-spoken, unornamented language used here.
Listen for
- how the vocal delivery of 'can we pretend' shifts in intensity or resignation as it recurs
- the tension between the hopeful painting metaphor and the more troubled light/shadow imagery
- whether the second verse's brighter color imagery sounds more insistent or more hollow than the first
- the effect of the outro dropping all imagery and repeating only the title phrase
- any instrumental softening or intensifying under the repeated question that colors its sincerity
About Bill Withers
William Harrison Withers Jr. was an American soul and R&B singer and songwriter.
1938 - 2020 / United States
Full biography and catalogue