Jackie Wilson / Soul Galore / 1966
What's Done In the Dark (Will One Day Come to Light)
wistful and uneasy, curdling into resigned bitterness
A hazy meditation on a relationship built on avoidance rather than resolution, this song circles the idea that fate or habit excuses broken promises, before collapsing into a long, bitter mantra of regret. It moves from vague philosophizing about inevitability to a stark, repetitive admission of wasted time.
self-deception inevitability vs. choice emotional avoidance regret escapism through repetition
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses a lover directly, using conditional and confessional language; the voice is intimate but evasive, more interested in explaining away guilt than examining it, which makes the speaker only partly reliable.
What happens
The song opens with an almost fatalistic shrug about direction and destiny, as if the relationship's course was never really a choice. The verses then admit physical desire and a contradictory need for distance, suggesting attraction and claustrophobia coexist. The chorus returns to the idea that broken promises and unshakeable feelings are simply natural, a kind of built-in alibi. A brief turn toward describing the couple as living in a fantasy, paired with an odd insistence on facing reality, exposes the tension between illusion and truth. The song then abandons argument altogether, ending in a lengthy, unbroken repetition of a single line of regret, as though the earlier justifications have finally failed.
How it's built
Verse-chorus form with two matched verses and a returning chorus, but the song abandons its own architecture at the end, dissolving into an extended vamp of a single repeated line. That collapse functions as the real structural event of the song -- argument gives way to obsessive restatement.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song begins by universalizing the couple's situation, framing their path as something shared by everyone and therefore not worth resisting. This rhetorical move sets up the song's central evasion: treating choice as fate.
First verse pair
“weak in my knees”
Desire and claustrophobia are presented back to back, with the narrator wanting closeness and distance in the same breath, establishing the push-pull that never gets resolved.
Chorus
“come naturally”
By attaching broken promises and unshakeable feelings to the same word used earlier for fate, the chorus reframes moral failure as something outside anyone's control.
Second verse pair
“living a dream in a dream”
The image of a doubled dream suggests total detachment from consequence, immediately undercut by an odd call to face reality, which the song never actually does.
Closing vamp
“wasted so much time”
The sudden abandonment of argument for pure repetition suggests the earlier philosophizing was a way of postponing this simpler, harder admission, which finally arrives unadorned and unresolved.
Craft
- refrain as alibi
- The recurring claim that things happen naturally works almost like a legal defense, used twice to normalize broken promises before the song abandons that defense entirely.
- physical euphemism
- Bodily sensations like weakness and breathlessness stand in for desire and anxiety, letting the narrator describe emotional conflict without naming it directly.
- contradiction
- The pairing of living in a dream with facing reality in adjacent lines highlights the narrator's inability to reconcile fantasy and honesty, rather than resolving it.
- repetition as collapse
- The closing section's single repeated line abandons narrative development, using sheer accumulation to convey exhaustion and regret more forcefully than argument could.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song's insistence on naturalness as a coping mechanism, a way of avoiding responsibility for a relationship that both parties know is failing. The closing repetition then reads as the truth breaking through the rationalizations that dominate the verses and chorus. An alternative reading is less ironic: the narrator may genuinely believe in fated attraction, and the final regret is not a rejection of that belief but a separate, exhausted coda about time lost regardless of whether the relationship was meant to be. The lyrics support either reading; the song does not resolve which is correct.
Context
I do not have reliable information connecting these lyrics to a specific Jackie Wilson single or session, and the content here does not match the commonly known theme suggested by the title, which typically concerns hidden truths eventually being exposed. I'm treating the lyrics as given without assuming further biographical or production context, since I cannot verify those details.
Listen for
- How the vocal handles the shift from conversational verses to the mantra-like ending
- Whether the repeated closing line is delivered with rising intensity or flat resignation
- Any musical change (key, arrangement, tempo) that marks the transition into the final vamp
- The contrast in vocal texture between the breathy desire lines and the harder-edged regret refrain