Golden cherry red "Midnight blue"? – Lou Gramm – Its meaning

An eighteen-month-old child sees the world in black and white, without shades of gray. It is a fact of life that when this child has a conflict before him or her, they polarize quite quickly, it is one extreme or the other. And the same sentiment is demonstrated in Lou Gramm’s 1987 number one hit, Midnight bluealthough a father talking to his son about the realities of life.

It is an important differentiation. Sometimes life is cherry red or midnight blue. And it is true that this song is a ballad, a love song, but it is much more than that with its bold but simple, strident and vibrant guitar work.

Life could be oversimplified by thinking of it in terms of cherry red. gold midnight blue, but it is true, many times we are offered two options, but a myriad of ways in which enact those two options.

I believe that life is designed in a simple way, but we are apt to complicate it. Very often we draw complexities from it that we dare to be mad at. We learn the hard way, if not the initial easy way.

And there is a sense in this song of a person’s solidarity. He’s not a perfect person by any means, but a person anyway – an authentic person with a fixed character in reality – his own reality; one that generally aligns itself with the world they encounter.

This person no longer follows others, but seeks go ahead, fulfilling what was committed and promised. Going back to the ballad Midnight blue it’s about meeting love. It’s about waiting, staying, and being there for that person we’ve committed to …

“I won’t say where,

And I don’t know when

But soon there will come a day

I’ll be back again. “

It is a promise. Midnight blue it is a promise of faith: return, return. And it’s a pretty black and white situation for us this way too. We live and die by our choices. What will it be? Cherry red or midnight blue?

© SJ Wickham, 2009.