Roxy Music / Roxy Music / 1972
If There Is Something
searching and anxious, giving way to tender, then wistful and hypnotic
An early Roxy Music track that starts as a fractured, almost philosophical rumination on identity and desire before collapsing into a simple, sincere catalogue of devotional promises, and then dissolving entirely into a hypnotic, nostalgic coda. The song's structure mimics its subject: a search for stable meaning that keeps sliding into repetition and memory.
romantic devotion instability of meaning nostalgia for youth the gap between grand gesture and plain feeling self-consciousness about performance
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses a 'you' who is both a romantic object and, by the end, a more general figure from the past; the voice shifts from uncertain and analytical to plainly devoted to almost trance-like, suggesting an unreliable or shifting speaker rather than one fixed persona.
What happens
The song opens mid-thought, with the narrator interrogating his own motives and the instability of language itself, unsure what he wants or how to say it. This gives way abruptly to a second section where all that hesitation drops away and he simply lists absurd, over-the-top vows of devotion. The final section changes address and tense again, moving into a chant-like reminiscence of youth, as if the song has stopped trying to resolve its opening questions and instead surrendered to sensation and memory.
How it's built
Three distinct, almost unrelated sections rather than a conventional verse-chorus form: a knotty, syntactically broken opening; a plainspoken, list-driven middle section; and a long, repetitive outro built on a single refrain with variations. The lack of a returning chorus mirrors the lyric's own refusal to settle on one meaning.
Section by section
Opening verse
The narrator circles a question he can't quite phrase, worrying over motive and meaning in halting, unfinished clauses. The effect is of overhearing an internal argument rather than a clean statement of feeling; the search for 'peace of mind' is undercut by the very difficulty of expressing it.
Second verse
Language becomes explicitly the subject: the narrator worries that many different expressions might all be masking the same underlying feeling, reducing the whole enterprise of romantic declaration to something like a game with unclear rules.
Middle section (the vows)
All the hesitation vanishes. The narrator commits to a string of extravagant promises that escalate in scale, then land, almost bathetically, on picturing a shared, humble domestic life.','quote':
Middle section continued
“growing potatoes by the score”
The sudden specificity and homeliness of this closing image punctures the grandiosity of the preceding vows, suggesting the real desire underneath the performance is something plain and settled rather than heroic.
Closing refrain
“when you were young”
The address shifts from erotic devotion to memory, and the repeated tag turns the song into something closer to a ritual chant than a pop chorus. The imagery of diminishing scale, larger hills, taller trees, greener grass, frames adulthood and its declarations as a falling-away from an earlier, more vivid state of being.
Craft
- anacoluthon / broken syntax
- The opening lines start and restart clauses, trailing off mid-thought, enacting the narrator's difficulty pinning down what he actually means rather than describing that difficulty from outside.
- hyperbole
- The middle section's escalating physical feats (climbing, swimming, walking impossible distances) are deliberately overblown, treating romantic cliché with mock-epic sincerity that is also oddly moving.
- anaphora
- The repeated imperative and parenthetical tag in the closing section builds a chant structure, replacing argument with incantation as the song shifts from thought to feeling.
- domestic imagery as anticlimax
- After the grand vows, the devotion lands on modest, unglamorous images of home and gardening, deflating the hyperbole into something more believable and quietly comic.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a study in how romantic language fails to hold: it opens by admitting that any given expression of feeling might be interchangeable with any other, then tests that by producing an obviously excessive one anyway, and finally retreats into nostalgia because straightforward declaration proves inadequate. An alternative reading takes the sections as genuinely disconnected fragments, an early Roxy Music habit of collage assembled from unrelated ideas, in which case the thematic coherence I'm describing may be more a property of listening for pattern than of authorial intent.
Context
This is the opening track of Roxy Music's 1972 debut album, recorded when the band's sound combined Ferry's crooning, art-school sensibility with Eno's early synthesizer treatments and Mackay's saxophone/oboe textures. The album as a whole is known for stitching together disparate stylistic and structural elements within single songs, which fits the way this track moves through three barely related sections.
Listen for
- The halting, syntactically broken delivery of the opening lines versus the plainer phrasing once the vows begin
- The tonal shift when hyperbolic romantic promises suddenly resolve into a humble domestic image
- How the closing section abandons narrative for a hypnotic, repeated chant
- Instrumental texture changes across the three sections, since the arrangement likely shifts to match each lyrical mode
- The way the addressee's identity seems to shift between the middle and closing sections
About Roxy Music
Roxy Music were an English rock band formed in 1970 by Bryan Ferry and Graham Simpson (bass). By the time the band recorded their first album in early 1972, Ferry and Simpson were joined by Andy Mackay (saxophone/oboe), Phil Manzanera (guitar), Paul Thompson (drums) and Brian Eno (synthesizer).
1971 - present / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue