Faces / First Step / 1970
Shake, Shudder, Shiver
weary, cold, half-defiant
A ragged blues-rock sketch of physical and spiritual misery, sung from the vantage of someone freezing, broke, and losing faith all at once. Faces use a loose, almost improvised lyric structure to let discomfort and doubt bleed into each other without resolving either.
poverty and discomfort religious disillusionment survival mortality searching without resolution
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addressing no one in particular, occasionally invoking parents and God; the voice is plainspoken and unreliable in the sense that its complaints and resolve seem to contradict each other verse to verse.
What happens
The song opens on a scene of literal physical misery, then widens into a complaint against divine justice, then gestures toward some vague figure or fate (the river, the hoofing line) that might offer release or death, before ending on an open question about confronting the elements directly.
How it's built
The song is built less on conventional verse-chorus logic than on a loose accumulation of complaint-verses, each ending on a similar rhetorical question or statement of searching, which functions as a quasi-refrain without ever repeating word for word.
Section by section
Opening verse
“I shake and I shudder and I shiver”
The title phrase doubles as a description of literal cold and a bodily symptom of fear or illness, setting a tone of visceral discomfort rather than metaphorical suffering. The dying dog detail grounds the scene in a specific, almost documentary squalor.
Second verse
“there's no justice divine”
The complaint shifts from physical to existential, addressing parents and then implicitly God. The narrator's fatigue with waiting for divine intervention reads as both genuine despair and a kind of wry, resigned complaint typical of blues phrasing.
Third verse
The introduction of an unnamed man offering to show the narrator a river, paired with an oblique reference to approaching death, suggests either a literal brush with mortality or a symbolic crossing — the ambiguity is likely intentional, keeping the stakes personal rather than explicitly allegorical.
Closing verse
The final image of standing exposed on a hilltop during a storm reads as a gesture of defiance or surrender to fate, but the song ends on a question rather than an answer, refusing to resolve whether the search described throughout has been for death, meaning, or just relief.
Craft
- pathetic fallacy
- The cold room, broken windows, and dying dog mirror the narrator's own deteriorating state, collapsing inner and outer conditions into one image of neglect.
- repetition with variation
- The recurring phrase about searching for 'what it is I'm looking for' acts as a refrain-like anchor, but its vagueness keeps the object of the search undefined, reinforcing the song's drifting, unresolved quality.
- rhetorical question
- The closing lines pose questions rather than answers, leaving the narrator's fate and resolve genuinely uncertain rather than dramatized toward a clear conclusion.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a blues-inflected meditation on hardship and doubt, where physical deprivation and spiritual exhaustion are treated as the same problem — both forms of waiting for relief that never comes. A secondary reading could frame it more literally as a song about contemplating death or risk (the river, the storm) as an active response to that exhaustion, rather than just a metaphor for despair; the lyric's looseness supports both without confirming either.
Context
Credited to Ronnie Wood and Ronnie Lane, this is one of the rawer, blues-based tracks on Faces' debut album First Step, recorded shortly after the band's formation from the ashes of Small Faces and the Jeff Beck Group. The album as a whole leans into loose, jam-adjacent rock rather than tightly constructed pop songwriting, which fits this track's unresolved, almost stream-of-consciousness lyric structure. I don't have reliable specific biographical detail behind this particular song's composition.
Listen for
- the shift in tone between the opening's domestic misery and the later existential questioning
- how the vocal delivery handles the recurring searching phrase each time it returns
- the contrast between the slow-blues vocal phrasing and any more driving instrumental sections
- whether the band's loose, jam-like arrangement underscores the lyric's refusal to resolve
About Faces
Faces are an English rock band formed in London in 1969. They formed after Small Faces lead singer and guitarist Steve Marriott left to form Humble Pie, and the remaining Small Faces—bassist Ronnie Lane, drummer Kenney Jones, and keyboardist Ian McLagan—recruited lead singer Rod Stewart and guitarist Ronnie Wood, both formerly of the Jeff Beck Group, and shortened the band's name to Faces.
1969 - 1975 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue