Kris Delmhorst / Strange Conversation / 2006
Since You Went Away
quietly devastated, resigned
A spare, blues-structured lament built from the simplest possible materials: the natural world has gone dull and wrong because a lover is gone. Kris Delmhorst sets a Langston Hughes poem to music, using the stripped-down AAB blues stanza to let grief accumulate through repetition rather than development.
loss and absence nature as emotional mirror grief expressed through understatement the blues tradition diminished perception
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses no one directly but confesses an interior collapse to an implied listener; the repeated hedging phrasing makes the voice feel dazed rather than dramatic, as if still absorbing the loss.
What happens
There isn't a plot so much as a slow inventory: the speaker catalogs how the sky, sun, and stars have all dimmed, then admits confusion and helplessness, then notes small physical symptoms of grief (a sigh, a dry throat, a held-back tear). The song doesn't resolve; it simply keeps returning to the same hinge phrase that names the cause.
How it's built
Classic blues AAB stanzas: two nearly identical lines of complaint followed by a third that lands on the refrain naming the departure. A brief non-blues middle section breaks the pattern with three rhymed lines before the song falls back into the AAB shape and then dissolves into the refrain repeated alone, trailing off rather than closing.
Section by section
Opening stanzas
The speaker begins by dimming the sky itself, establishing the pattern of displacing emotional devastation onto celestial imagery before the hinge line names its cause. ignore this stub
Opening stanzas
“the stars don't shine so bright”
The speaker opens by dimming the sky itself, projecting loss onto celestial imagery before the refrain supplies the cause. The hedged phrasing suggests someone still testing whether their perception or the world has actually changed.
Second stanza
The complaint shifts from cosmic to personal: the sky loses color and the speaker admits paralysis, noting that everything else now seems to possess the absent person in a way that mocks the speaker's own loss.
Middle break
“the bird's forgot his song”
The brief departure from the AAB pattern tightens the rhyme and compresses the imagery, giving the silence of nature its most vivid image. The bird's muteness stands in for the speaker's own loss of voice or music.
Final stanza and fade
The grief becomes bodily rather than cosmic: a sigh, a dry throat, a tear that won't fall. The song ends by stripping away even the AAB structure, repeating only the refrain until it becomes pure sound, suggesting the thought has nowhere left to go.
Craft
- anaphora
- Nearly every line opens with the same hedging phrase, which flattens the speaker's certainty into a kind of stunned shrug and reinforces the blues form's hypnotic repetition.
- pathetic fallacy
- Sky, sun, stars, and birdsong are all described as diminished or silent, projecting internal loss onto the external world rather than stating the emotion directly.
- refrain
- The title phrase closes every stanza and finally stands alone, functioning as both explanation and wound that won't stop reopening.
- understatement
- The complaints stay small and physical (a sigh, a dry throat) rather than escalating into grand declarations, which paradoxically makes the grief feel more total.
Reading it
Read most simply, the song is a direct blues lament about heartbreak, using the genre's traditional strategy of mapping personal devastation onto the natural world. A secondary reading, supported by the poem's Hughes authorship and its plainness, treats the flattened nature imagery as almost ironic or performative - the speaker reaching for grand cosmic language to describe an ordinary, common grief, which is part of what gives blues its dignity: inflating private pain to the scale of the sky without irony undercutting it.
Context
The lyric is Langston Hughes's poem of the same title, written in the blues-stanza form he used across much of his poetry to align black vernacular musical structure with literary verse. Delmhorst's album Strange Conversation sets several Hughes poems to original music, so the words themselves predate the recording by decades; the musical setting is her interpretive choice, not the source of the text's structure.
Listen for
- how closely the melody tracks the AAB blues shape versus where it breaks from it
- the shift from grand natural imagery to small physical details late in the song
- the way the refrain's repetition at the end becomes almost wordless, more moan than statement
- any instrumental choices (space, minor inflections) that mimic the 'everything dimmed' imagery
About Kris Delmhorst
Kris Delmhorst is an American singer-songwriter and musician. Originally from Brooklyn, New York City, United States, she now lives in Western Massachusetts, is an active member of the Boston folk scene, and tours internationally.
/ United States
Full biography and catalogue