Kathleen Edwards / Asking for Flowers / 2008
Buffalo
weary, wintry, resigned but tender
A road song about a stalled romance, built around a literal winter storm that closes the highway and shuts down power in Buffalo. Edwards uses the weather and the border crossing as a physical correlative for emotional impasse, with a repeated plea that reads as both self-directed and aimed at a partner.
romantic drift isolation impasse and avoidance travel/transience weather as emotional metaphor
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addressing a lover or ex directly, recounting a specific drive and its emotional undertow; the voice is intimate but guarded, more observant than confessional, and not fully reliable about her own motives.
What happens
The song opens with a season turning over — loneliness through summer giving way to a storm-driven autumn — and a shared drive that becomes charged with unspoken tension. Silence and irregular contact wear on the narrator, who admits she's floundering without offering resolution. The scene shifts to a bar where she's played countless shows, and the advice to "go home" surfaces, addressed to someone who won't take it. By the end, literal roads are closed, the power's out in Buffalo, and a border official tells her she can leave but won't make it back — collapsing the physical trip and the emotional one into a single stuck moment.
How it's built
Loose verse structure without a conventional chorus; instead a short spoken-like refrain ("don't be like that") recurs and accumulates, functioning as both a chorus substitute and a verbal tic that intensifies through repetition, especially stacking up at the song's end.
Section by section
Opening verses
“lightning and snow”
The unusual pairing of lightning and snow sets an unstable, off-season tone right away, suggesting emotional weather that doesn't follow normal patterns — a relationship out of sync with itself.
Middle verse
“I've run aground, truth be told”
This is the narrator's clearest admission of failure or stagnation, delivered almost as a throwaway line before she deflects with a promise to explain later, which she never really does.
Refrain
The repeated plea works as a plain, almost childlike request for the other person to stop behaving a certain way, but its vagueness lets listeners fill in whatever specific behavior fits their own relationship history.
Bar verse
The image of countless anonymous shows in a dive bar underscores a life built on transience and repetition, reinforcing the sense that this romantic stall is just one more loop in a familiar pattern.
Closing verse
“you can go but you won't make it home”
The customs official's line delivers the song's key ambiguity: permission to leave physically doesn't guarantee arrival, literal or emotional. It reframes the entire song as being about a return that may not be possible.
Craft
- pathetic fallacy
- The storm, snow, and closed roads mirror the emotional freeze between the two people, letting weather do the work of describing a relationship that's become impassable.
- synecdoche via place names
- Buffalo and the border crossing stand in for liminality — a place between two countries becomes a metaphor for being between two states of a relationship, neither leaving nor staying.
- refrain as emotional shorthand
- The repeated plea is deliberately vague and colloquial, doing more emotional work through insistence and repetition than through explicit statement.
- understatement
- Major admissions (like drifting or losing control) are delivered flatly, which fits the narrator's guarded, road-worn persona.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the storm and border crossing as extended metaphor for a relationship that's technically still open but functionally closed — both parties can move, but neither can get where they need to be. An alternative reading takes the song more literally, as simply a travelogue of a difficult tour-related drive through Buffalo in bad weather, with the emotional lines read as incidental color rather than sustained metaphor. The text supports both, though the recurring refrain and the pointed ambiguity of the closing line lean toward the metaphorical reading.
Context
Asking for Flowers (2008) followed Edwards' well-received Failer and Back to Me, and continued her interest in plainspoken, narrative songwriting often set against Canadian or border-town geography. I don't have specific biographical detail confirming this song refers to a real event or relationship, so any autobiographical reading should be treated as speculative.
Listen for
- The tonal shift between the matter-of-fact verses and the more plaintive delivery of the refrain
- How the weather imagery escalates from odd (lightning and snow) to fully obstructive (closed roads, no power)
- The flat, almost deadpan delivery of the admission about running aground
- The way the closing line about not making it home lands as both literal and metaphorical
About Kathleen Edwards
Kathleen Margaret Edwards is a Canadian singer-songwriter and musician. Her 2002 debut album, Failer, contained the singles "Six O'Clock News" and "Hockey Skates".
b. 1978 / Canada
Full biography and catalogue