Minnie Riperton / Come to My Garden (Remastered) / 1970
Oh, By the Way
tender, wistful, quietly urgent
A brief, hazy love song built almost entirely on the tension between hesitation and disclosure, in which the singer circles the fact that she has hidden her feelings too long. It resolves into a wordplay hook that turns a casual conversational phrase into the sound of a confession finally slipping out.
withheld affection self-disclosure time and delay romantic longing shyness
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses a beloved directly, admitting to having concealed her feelings; the voice is intimate and somewhat shy rather than fully confident, giving the confession a searching, unresolved quality.
What happens
The song doesn't tell a story so much as stage a single moment of realization. The verses rehearse the same idea from slightly different angles — teasing, wanting, kissing — each time returning to the admission that she has kept quiet too long. The title phrase arrives as the release valve: what began as hedging and evasion becomes, almost incidentally, a direct statement.
How it's built
Two short verses with near-identical grammatical shape lead into a repeated refrain built on the title phrase. The lack of a bridge or contrasting section keeps the song circular, mirroring the speaker's inability to move past her own hesitation until the final repeated lines let her act.
Section by section
First verse
The speaker measures her feelings in units of time — how long it takes to tell, to want — which frames emotion as something delayed rather than absent. The admission that she has kept this to herself acts as the first crack in her composure.
Second verse
“I've wasted so may precious days”
The imagery shifts from telling to physical closeness (teasing, kissing), intensifying the stakes while repeating the same temporal logic. The regret over wasted time sharpens into something closer to urgency, setting up the shift toward action in the next section.
Refrain
“Now that I have found a way”
The declaration of finding a way to act functions as the song's turning point, however understated. The repeated title phrase that follows works less as narrative content than as vocal texture — a conversational tic transformed into the actual site of emotional release, delivered with a shrug that undercuts its own significance even as it resolves the tension built in the verses.
Craft
- anaphora
- Repeating the same opening construction across verse lines creates a stammering, circling quality that dramatizes indecision rather than describing it.
- idiom literalized
- The casual filler phrase that titles the song is repurposed as the actual moment of confession, so a throwaway expression becomes the emotional turning point.
- self-correction
- A line is repeated with a slight variation in tense or phrasing, suggesting the speaker revising herself mid-thought, as if she is discovering the right words as she sings.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a miniature study of romantic hesitation dissolving into disclosure, where the title's casual phrasing enacts the very reluctance the lyrics describe — the confession arrives sideways, almost as an afterthought, because that's how it has to arrive for someone who has been holding back. An alternative reading could hear the repeated title phrase more ironically, as still deflecting real intimacy even at the moment of supposed openness, since the speaker never states plainly what she wants, only that she has decided to say it.
Context
This track comes from Riperton's 1970 debut solo album Come to My Garden, made with contributions from Charles Stepney and the Rotary Connection circle, years before the vocal pyrotechnics of 'Lovin' You' made her famous. The album leans toward lush, orchestral soul-pop rather than the airier ballad style she'd later be known for, and this song's modest scale and conversational hook fit that early, less commercially polished phase of her career. I don't have reliable details on this specific song's writing or recording history beyond its album placement.
Listen for
- the way the repeated verse structure mimics circling hesitation
- how the title phrase shifts from filler to payoff on repetition
- any vocal shading Riperton adds to the refrain that colors it as shy versus assured
- the contrast between the plain, understated lyric and her voice's expressive range
- the absence of a bridge, which keeps the song feeling like one sustained thought rather than a story
About Minnie Riperton
Minnie Julia Riperton was an American soul singer and songwriter best known for her 1974 single "Lovin' You", her five-octave vocal range, and her use of the whistle register.
1947 - 1979 / United States
Full biography and catalogue