FEELS LIKE HOME

Feels like home to me
Feels like home to me
Feels like I'm all the way back where
I come from

Having been musing on breakup songs earlier this week, I started searching for something more hopeful in my music library—and that’s when I happily stumbled upon Randy Newman’s“Feels Like Home.” To me, it’s one of the greatest love songs ever written. Its lyrics are raw and unguarded, like a quiet confession from someone with nowhere left to hide—except in the arms of the one person they can trust and open up to.

Something in your eyes makes me want to lose myself,
Makes me want to lose myself in your arms.
There’s something in your voice makes my heart beat fast.
Hope this feeling lasts the rest of my life.
If you knew how lonely my life has been,
And how low I’ve felt for so long.
If you knew how I wanted someone to come along,
And change my life the way you’ve done...

In its honesty lies a rare kind of comfort: the feeling of truly belonging with someone—of finding home, not as a place, but as a person. And really (outside of the enlightened single folk among us), isn’t that what most of us are searching for—or perhaps lucky enough to have already found?

When Newman sings, “If you knew how I wanted someone to come along, and change your life the way you’ve done,”there’s an almost down-to-earth clumsiness in how the line resolves—like the narrator is beyond worrying about finding the perfect words to express his feelings in the contentedness of the moment.

A window breaks down a long, dark street,
And a siren wails in the night.
But I’m alright ’cause I have you here with me,
And I can almost see through the dark—there is light.
If you knew how much this moment means to me,
And how long I’ve waited for your touch.
If you knew how happy you are making me,
I’ve never thought that I’d love anyone so much...

There’s a beautiful contrast between the external insecurity and danger “down a long, dark street” and the sound of a wailing siren, contrasted with the warm cosiness and security of finding someone who feels like home—acting as a kind of protective shelter from the chaos and perils of the outside world.

This time, closing the second verse, the narrator arrives at a similar yet cleaner and more satisfying suspensive ending—though it still carries a beautifully human roughness that sets it apart from something more sophisticated and Sondheim-like in its basic rhyme. Newman is being deliberate here, setting the tone at a level where nothing in the sentiment is expressed too ornately, which might reduce the directness and emotional impact of the song's central, sincere theme.

Feels like home to me
Feels like home to me
Feels like I'm all the way back where I belong
Feels like I'm all the way back where I belong