The Chills / Submarine Bells / 1990
Don't Be - Memory
wistful, anxious, quietly desperate
A long-distance or interrupted romance is narrated through the lens of memory itself, which the singer both relies on and resents. The song moves from reassurance that the separation is temporary to an admission that recollection is becoming a painful, almost hostile force standing in for the person it represents.
distance and separation memory as burden impermanence of love domestic intimacy recalled environmental/ecological undertone (greenhouse imagery)
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses an absent or distanced lover directly, oscillating between comforting them (and himself) and confessing doubt; the voice is sincere but unreliable in its optimism, repeatedly undercut by its own hedging.
What happens
The song opens with the narrator resisting forgetting, then promises the separation won't last. As it progresses, grand declarations of eternal love are qualified and doubted, replaced by smaller, almost superstitious gestures (letters, repeated phrases) meant to preserve closeness. The middle recalls cozy shared domestic scenes to anchor the relationship in sensation rather than abstraction, before the song turns to confront memory itself as something that no longer comforts but afflicts, ending in a plea for memory not to become a replacement for presence.
How it's built
Built on alternating verse-refrain pairs where the refrain phrase 'it won't be long' recurs with shifting urgency and subtle lyrical variation (from 'our love is strong' to questioning whether something has gone wrong), giving a false sense of stability. The bridge-like middle section shifts to concrete, sensory recollection before the song's emotional pivot in the penultimate verse, where memory is explicitly named as the antagonist. The closing repetitions of the title phrase function almost as an incantation or plea.
Section by section
Opening verse and first refrain
The narrator admits a wish to forget that he immediately disavows, establishing an uneasy relationship with recollection from the first line. The refrain's promise that the wait won't be long is qualified by a conditional clause, planting doubt inside the reassurance itself.27 words left for quote use.
Second verse: eternity undercut
“eternity is such a long time”
The narrator backs away from a grand romantic claim almost as soon as he makes it, admitting that permanence itself might be unbearable. This self-undercutting is characteristic of the song's method: big feeling stated, then immediately qualified.
Greenhouse refrain
A domestic, almost mundane image intrudes into the refrain, puncturing its lyricism and suggesting the relationship is being managed like a fragile, cultivated thing rather than a natural force. The refrain's question about whether something has gone wrong marks the first crack in the earlier confidence.
Letters and title phrase introduced
The narrator proposes a practical, almost compulsive ritual (repeated correspondence) as a hedge against separation, then introduces the song's central plea directly to memory, asking it not to become a cold substitute for presence.
Domestic recollection verse
“Taking turns at Swamp Thing”
The song's most concrete, affectionate imagery appears here, listing small shared rituals rather than abstractions. The intrusion of an order arriving by phone breaks the reverie, implying outside obligations are what actually separate the couple, not metaphor.
Memory as adversary
“uncaring power of memory”
This is the song's thematic hinge: memory, previously treated as a comfort to be preserved, is now described as cruel in its precision, producing resentment rather than solace. The language of cruelty marks a tonal break from the gentler earlier verses.
Final refrain and closing pleas
The repeated title phrase returns with intensified emotional stakes, now framed by admissions of feeling unacknowledged and asking not to be regretted. The song ends without resolution, repeating its plea rather than answering it.
Craft
- apostrophe
- The repeated address to 'memory' as if it were a person who could choose to behave or misbehave personifies an abstract process, letting the singer argue with his own mind as though it were an outside force.
- refrain with variation
- The recurring line about time passing slowly shifts its companion phrase across verses, tracking the narrator's declining confidence while keeping the melodic shape constant, so reassurance curdles into unease without a change in form.
- concrete sensory imagery
- Specific domestic details (a shared tape recorder, a nickname for a room, a B-movie reference) ground an otherwise abstract meditation on time and feeling in lived texture, making the eventual loss of that texture more acute.
- irony
- The narrator seeks memory's comfort yet names it 'uncaring' and 'spiteful,' revealing that what should preserve intimacy instead exposes its absence with painful precision.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as being about the gap between a relationship's lived texture and its afterimage in memory: the narrator fears that recollection, however vivid, is a diminished and even corrosive substitute for actual presence, and the repeated refrain is as much self-persuasion as reassurance to the absent lover. An alternative reading takes the greenhouse and swamp-creature references as signals of ecological anxiety running alongside the personal narrative, with the fragile, climate-controlled relationship mirroring a wider concern with impermanence and care under threat -- consistent with other lyrical preoccupations on this album -- though the lyric's center of gravity remains personal and romantic rather than overtly environmental.
Context
Submarine Bells (1990) was The Chills' commercial breakthrough and is often noted for pairing jangly, melodic pop arrangements with lyrics that carry more unease and ambivalence than the surface sound suggests; this song's shift from reassurance to disquiet fits that pattern, though I don't have confirmed biographical detail linking it to a specific real-life event.
Listen for
- how the refrain's companion phrase subtly changes meaning across repetitions
- the shift in tone when memory is addressed directly as though it were a person
- the contrast between the warm domestic verse and the clinical, resentful language that follows it
- whether the music brightens or darkens as the lyric's confidence erodes
- the unresolved ending, where the plea repeats rather than resolves
About The Chills
The Chills are a New Zealand indie rock band that formed in Dunedin in 1980. The band were fronted by founding mainstay singer-songwriter, guitarist Martin Phillipps.
1980 - present / Dunedin
Full biography and catalogue