The Kinks / Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One / 1970
This Time Tomorrow
weary, suspended, quietly wistful
A song written from an airplane window seat, using the vantage of altitude to turn geographic distance into emotional and existential distance. It's less about travel itself than about the strange calm of being suspended between places, unaccountable to the world below.
displacement touring life alienation from modernity escape impermanence
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator speaking to an unnamed companion (implied by the repeated plural question), likely a bandmate or fellow traveler; the voice is reflective and slightly dissociated rather than distressed
What happens
The song opens with a question about the future that never gets a firm answer, then moves into physical description of flight -- clouds, altitude, the shrinking world below -- before drifting into a more detached, almost trance-like acceptance of not knowing or caring where the journey leads. It ends by looping back to the same unanswered question, suggesting no resolution was ever the point.
How it's built
Built on a repeating question-and-image pattern rather than a strict verse/chorus divide: each stanza opens with the same temporal question and answers with a fragment of altitude imagery. The song doesn't develop through contrast so much as accumulation, circling back to its opening line at the end, which reinforces the sense of suspended time rather than progress.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated opening question anchors every section and mimics the repetitive, disorienting rhythm of travel, where each day poses the same unanswerable question.
- aerial imagery as metaphor
- The physical descent-and-ascent perspective (clouds, the shrinking world, houses turned to endless rows) becomes a metaphor for emotional withdrawal -- the higher and further the narrator gets, the less the ordinary world seems to matter.
- personification
- Clouds are described with sadness and the world is imagined looking back up at the narrator, blurring the line between external landscape and internal feeling.
- circular structure
- The song ends on the same unanswered question it opened with, formally enacting the theme of unresolved drift rather than narrative closure.
Reading it
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Context
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Listen for
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About The Kinks
The Kinks were an English rock band formed in London in 1962. The band's original line-up comprised brothers Ray Davies and Dave Davies, Pete Quaife (bass), and Mick Avory.
1964 - 1996 / United Kingdom
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