George Michael / Faith (2010 Remastered) / 1987
Kissing a Fool
melancholic, wounded but composed
A torch song about a love ended by other people's interference rather than a lack of feeling, sung by a narrator who oscillates between bitterness and lingering devotion. Its jazz-inflected balladry frames heartbreak as a kind of dignified resignation rather than rage.
betrayal by outside influence wounded pride unresolved devotion self-deception in love the gap between feeling and action
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses a former lover directly, alternating between accusation and tenderness; the voice is emotionally reliable but self-aware of its own foolishness, admitting complicity even while blaming outside forces.
What happens
The song opens with the narrator lamenting distance and lost potential, blaming the ex-lover's susceptibility to others' opinions for the relationship's collapse. It moves into a general meditation on how people meddle in love, then to a moment of clear-eyed recrimination about tears and lies, before the narrator resolves to recover alone. A bridge softens into an offer of enduring availability, and the final verse circles back to the opening image, now recast as an admission that the narrator himself was the fool for believing in the relationship's depth.
How it's built
The song uses a fairly conventional verse-chorus-bridge shape, but its power comes from repetition with variation: the same 'you are far' image opens and closes the song, first as complaint, finally as confession, marking an emotional shift rather than a structural one. The chorus about 'people' functions almost as a proverb, repeated near-verbatim to generalize the personal betrayal into something universal.
Section by section
Opening verse
“you are far”
The song begins with physical and emotional distance stated flatly, immediately establishing the narrator as someone who believes he could have been the answer if only he'd been chosen or trusted.
First chorus
The shift to a general statement about 'people' broadens the personal wound into something like folk wisdom, letting the narrator distance himself from raw hurt by philosophizing about how outside interference corrodes relationships.
Middle verse
“covered me with kisses and lies”
This is the song's most direct accusation, condensing betrayal into a single compact image before the narrator pulls back with a plea to keep something of the relationship intact even as he says goodbye.
Second verse
The narrator repeats the earlier structure but changes the outcome—no longer hoping to be her star, he commits instead to self-repair, signaling a shift from pleading to resignation.
Bridge
The tone softens considerably here; rather than closing the door, the narrator offers open-ended patience, positioning himself as a permanent option rather than someone who has truly moved on, which complicates the surrounding bitterness.
Final verse
“guess you were kissing a fool”
The title phrase returns, but the fool is revealed to be the narrator himself, admitting that his belief in mutual love may have been the real deception all along.
Craft
- framing repetition
- The near-identical opening and closing verses bookend the song, but the meaning shifts from blaming the other person to admitting his own naivety, turning repetition into an arc rather than mere refrain.
- personification of 'people'
- Outside opinion is treated as an almost hostile collective force capable of stealing hearts, which lets the narrator externalize blame while still implicating the lover's susceptibility to it.
- understatement
- Rather than dramatic accusations, the song favors restrained, almost aphoristic lines about peace of mind and pieces to mend, which fits the song's composed, jazz-club melancholy rather than operatic despair.
- irony
- The title phrase initially seems to describe the ex-lover deceiving someone else, but by the end it's revealed to describe the narrator himself, reversing the direction of the accusation.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a song less about a lover's cruelty than about the narrator's own reluctance to accept that belief and reality diverged: the outside 'people' function partly as a genuine culprit and partly as a convenient story he tells himself. An alternative reading takes the accusations at face value, seeing the ex-lover as manipulative and the narrator as a wronged party whose bridge offer of continued availability is simply generosity rather than self-deception. The lyric supports both, and the ambiguity is likely intentional.
Context
Released in 1987 on Faith, this was one of several singles from an album that helped George Michael establish a solo identity distinct from Wham!, leaning into a more adult, torch-song sensibility. I don't have reliable biographical detail linking this specific song to real events in Michael's life, so any such connection should be treated as speculative.
Listen for
- the way the opening and closing verses mirror each other with a reversed meaning
- the restrained, almost spoken-word delivery during the verses versus the more melodic chorus
- the bridge's shift in tone from bitterness to quiet devotion
- the single blunt image of deception in the middle section standing out against the song's otherwise generalized language
About George Michael
George Michael was an English singer-songwriter and record producer. Regarded as a pop culture icon, he is one of the best-selling recording artists of all time.
1963 - 2016 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue