Damien Rice / 9 / 2006
9 Crimes
remorseful, tense, quietly desperate
A duet between a man and woman (recorded here as a solo vocal) confessing an affair in the aftermath, framed as a confession of guilt rather than a celebration of new love. The song circles around a single loaded question -- whether the betrayal, and the desire that caused it, can be forgiven -- without ever resolving it.
infidelity and guilt moral ambiguity desire versus loyalty repetition as unresolved conscience complicity
Who's speaking
The narrator addresses a wronged partner directly, admitting fault in a clipped, almost clinical register. He is not fully reliable -- he frames the affair partly as fate ('wrong time') and partly as his own failing, which suggests he hasn't settled his own account of what happened.
What happens
The song opens with a request to be discarded, admitting the affair is out of place and out of character. It moves into a strange metaphor about handing over a loaded weapon, which stands in for surrendering to temptation or handing responsibility to someone else. The second verse repeats the confession almost verbatim but names the act plainly as cheating. The back half of the song abandons narrative progression entirely, looping the same question -- is this alright -- until it dissolves into overlapping echoes and a final flat refusal.
How it's built
Two brief, nearly identical verses give the song its only forward motion; everything after is variation and repetition of the same short chorus-like phrase, which is layered and echoed with call-and-response backing vocals until it becomes incantatory. The single word negation at the very end functions as the song's only real resolution.
Section by section
Opening verse
“the wrong kind of place”
The narrator asks to be discarded before anything else is said, setting a tone of self-judgment. Framing the encounter by location and timing rather than by the other person's feelings hints at self-justification even inside a confession.
First chorus
“give my gun away when it's loaded”
The weapon image is left deliberately unresolved -- it could mean surrendering restraint, handing over power to someone else, or displacing responsibility for the damage. The repeated request for approval turns intimacy into negotiation.
Second verse
“cheating on you”
The euphemism drops away here; where the first verse hedged, this one names the offense directly, though the excuse about being pulled through by someone else immediately softens it again.
Extended outro
Structural repetition takes over completely, and the demand for reassurance becomes obsessive rather than sincere. The multiplying echoes suggest the question is being asked more to the narrator's own conscience than to the partner.
Final word
The single spoken negation at the close refuses the reassurance the entire song has been begging for, denying the narrator any absolution and leaving the confession unanswered.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- Giving away a loaded gun stands in for surrendering to desire or transferring blame -- an act that is dangerous however it's handled, implicating both people in what happens next.
- anaphora
- The repeated question about permission accumulates through the second half of the song, turning a plea for reassurance into something closer to an interrogation the narrator can't escape.
- call and response
- A second vocal echoing the same question in the background creates the effect of two people talking past each other, or one person's guilt answering itself.
- understatement
- Calling the affair 'a small crime' minimizes it in language while the music and repetition suggest the opposite -- the gap between the phrase and the emotional weight is where the song's tension lives.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the gun as a metaphor for desire or fault being passed between partners -- something that only becomes dangerous depending on how the other person receives it, which mirrors the shared complicity in an affair even as one partner did the cheating. An alternative reading takes the song as address to a new lover rather than the wronged one, in which case the repeated question is less about forgiveness than about whether the new relationship can survive being built on betrayal. The lyric supports both, since the addressee is never explicitly identified.
Context
The song appeared on Rice's second album, 9, released in 2006, several years after his prior band Juniper dissolved and after his acclaimed debut O. It was later used prominently by other artists' covers and in film, which extended its life well past the original album's context; beyond that, I don't have reliable biographical detail linking it to specific events in Rice's life.
Listen for
- the shift from euphemism to direct naming of the affair between the two verses
- how the backing vocal echoes the lead line slightly out of sync, creating a call-and-response effect
- the way repetition of the same short phrase intensifies rather than resolves the tension
- the abrupt, unadorned negation that ends the song after all the repeated questioning
About Damien Rice
Damien George Rice is an Irish singer-songwriter. He began his career as a member of the 1990s rock group Juniper, who were signed to Polygram Records in 1997.
b. 1973 / Ireland
Full biography and catalogue