Daily Lyric: GONNA BE ALL RIGHT

It gets so hot down here that your mind gets hazy

Tell me you like it and I’ll tell you you’re crazy

“No” is no answer for me and I won’t give up trying

Tell me I’m stuck here and I’ll tell you you’re lying

I’m so preoccupied with fifty ways to get out, my mind is hell-bent

But when I finally taste that freedom

I know it’ll be heaven-sent

And everything baby is gonna be all right

Gonna be all right

And everything baby is gonna be all right

Gonna be all right

The days are long and exhausting, and they seem to drag on

Today might be a bad day but soon today will be gone

It feels like the end of the world but never give up

‘Cause for every downhill there’s an up

Last night I had a dream that the end of the world was beginning

When I woke up I said the losing is over

I’m gonna start winning

And everything baby is gonna be all right ...

Once I thought I’d get away from that Jerusalem beauty

And try my luck with the Tel Aviv cuties

They looked at me like I was some kind of hick

So I got the hell outtatheah, it was making me sick

Since I come from out of town they think I’m some poor slob

If they wanna think so, let ‘em

‘Cause the only way to outsnob a snob is to be a bigger snob

So if these chicks don’t wanna know, forget ‘em

It’s OK, I understand their head

I’ve been through this kind of thing before

They’ll keep on scheissing my head

But you know I’ll be coming back for more

And everything baby is gonna be all right ...

©2023 The Hesh Inc.

Jebel al-Qarantal, a prominent landmark overlooking Jericho and seen clearly from the army base where I wrote the song. The linguistic resemblance to "quarantine" is not incidental.

I wrote this in the summer of 1985, when I was stationed on an artillery base just north of Jericho, which was still in Israeli hands at the time. Despite the smallness of the country of Israel—seriously, I was only a 45-minute bus ride from Jerusalem and maybe an hour and a half from home, tops—I had a hard time feeling cut off from my friends and family while serving on a base in the desert facing the Jordanians. (Interestingly enough, with the benefit of hindsight I can say that if social media had existed back then—with allowances for security, of course—I would not have had such a hard time of it all.) I wrote the song while on guard duty at various positions around the base, as encouragement to myself that I'd get through the temporary difficulty.

Musically, it borrows from Bryan Adams, whose Reckless album was a huge hit that year, as well as Thin Lizzy's "The Boys Are Back in Town." Unfortunately never recorded. (If I only had a regular band at the time and access to recording machinery, I could have filled albums and gone big. But no. Oh well.)