Doves / Some Cities / 2005
One of These Days
wistful, isolated, quietly resigned
A travelling song about erosion rather than departure — a narrator on the road, half-addressing a distant or absent woman, watches relationships and his own sense of self thin out over time. The lyric circles a few phrases rather than telling a story, building a mood of drift and dissolution instead of plot.
loneliness transience loss of connection self-erasure nostalgia for closeness
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator, seemingly on tour or travelling for work, addresses an unnamed 'my love' and recalls a woman who is perpetually unreachable by phone. The voice is unreliable in a soft way — details blur, the speaker admits to forgetting his purpose and disappearing into strangers, suggesting the song is less reportage than a mood remembered after the fact.
What happens
The song opens with a plea for any word or contact, introduces a woman defined by absence (always out, never home), then shifts to the road itself — signs, distance, strangers — where the narrator starts to lose his own outline. The second half abandons direct address almost entirely and becomes a meditation on friends scattering one by one, ending with the narrator predicting his own disappearance.
How it's built
Built on short, almost nursery-rhyme couplets that repeat and mutate rather than advance a clear verse-chorus narrative. Phrases recur with small variations (close friends who 'didn't stay,' then who 'drift away'), giving the song a tidal, accumulating structure rather than a linear one. The final repeated line about blowing away functions as the song's only real resolution, arrived at through repetition rather than a dramatic turn.
Section by section
Opening verses
“girl who's never home”
The narrator asks for any scrap of communication, then introduces an absent woman defined entirely by unavailability. The repetition of her unreachability sets the song's governing condition: contact is wanted but structurally impossible.
Road verse
“Myself I disappear”
The scene shifts from a phone call to a highway, and the speaker's identity starts to dissolve into the anonymous landscape of travel. Comparing himself obliquely to a killer or a man who works alone pushes the isolation from circumstantial to almost criminal, as if solitude has become a kind of guilt.
Friends refrain
The song pivots away from the romantic address to a broader elegy for friendships lost gradually rather than dramatically. The one-by-one phrasing emphasizes attrition over rupture — nobody leaves all at once, people simply stop being there.
Closing refrain
“One of these days I'll blow away”
The narrator applies the same slow-drift logic to himself, forecasting his own eventual disappearance with a kind of flat acceptance rather than alarm. The repetition of the line, rather than a lyrical resolution, is the song's actual ending — it just trails off into the inevitability it describes.
Craft
- repetition with variation
- Lines about the girl who's never home and the friends who were close return in slightly altered form, mimicking how memory loops and erodes details over time rather than preserving a fixed story.
- simile
- Comparing people drifting apart to a rolling sea naturalizes the loss — it frames abandonment as an inevitable tide rather than a choice anyone makes.
- ambiguous pronoun address
- The shifting 'you' (lover, friends, the listener) keeps the song from settling into a single relationship, making the loneliness feel general rather than tied to one failed romance.
- metaphor of dissolving matter
- The closing image of blowing away extends the drifting motif into something closer to literal disappearance, equating emotional isolation with physical dissipation.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a song about the erosion of intimacy under the pressure of distance and routine — touring, travel, or simply time — where the speaker becomes both witness to and eventual victim of the same slow disappearance he observes in his friends. An alternative reading takes the 'killer on a call' and 'man who works alone' lines more literally, as a brief persona shift into noir imagery, suggesting the narrator is dramatizing his loneliness as a kind of criminal isolation rather than describing literal events. The text supports the first reading more consistently; the second remains a plausible but secondary flourish.
Context
Some Cities (2005) followed Doves' more expansive The Last Broadcast, and much of its material reflects on the toll of relentless touring and distance from home — a context that fits this song's imagery of roads, signs, and disconnection, though I can't confirm specific biographical details behind this particular track.
Listen for
- the way the same couplets return with small wording changes, tracking a slow shift rather than a plot
- the tonal pivot from romantic address to communal loss of friends
- the sea-drift simile and how it reframes abandonment as natural rather than chosen
- the closing repeated line and whether the arrangement swells or thins out underneath it
About Doves
Doves are an English indie rock band formed in 1998, from Wilmslow, Cheshire. The band is composed of singer and bassist Jimi Goodwin and twin brothers, guitarist Jez and drummer Andy Williams.
1998 - present / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue