MY BABY’S GONNA LEAVE ME (YESTERDAY)
Written: Monterey Street, Farmington NM, fall 1971
This one started out as a C&W song, written around the corny time-paradox title line, but by the time Knees got around to putting it to music, it acquired a ZZ Toppish shuffle and an Elvis-like All Shook Up melody on the word “yesterday”. With all the overuse and abuse of the word “heart” in modern lyricism, Knees is proud that his only instance of the sappy word is in conjunction with the verb, “fibrillatin”. He also considers “have my lunch for breakfast” one of his best lines and wonders why Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson never used it in a movie.
My baby’s gonna do me dirty
She’s gonna fill my heart all full of blues
She’s gonna make my eyeballs feel like cryin
Yeah my baby’s gonna slip me some bad news.
Yeah my baby’s gonna sell me down the river
I’ll be howlin like a houn dog at bay
An the reason that I know all this will happen
My baby’s gonna leave me yesterday.
My baby’s gonna have my lunch for breakfast
She’s gonna have me babblin like a brook
She’s gonna set my heart a-fibrillatin
I’ll be squirmin like a catfish on a hook