Song Review: Strangers on a Train — Lost Her to Wolves
Lost her to wolves is a moaning song on how you become a stranger to the love of your life. You got to watch her tearing apart by wolves while she is enjoying it. The narrative is very honest, angry, emotionally desperate, betrayed, and at its weakest. The main character of our story is getting tortured by watching his love with another man, and he cannot do anything, because he is long dead. It could happen to many of us. Losing our love and not being able to do anything about it but to drink our sorrow away. All this is being told through a sad beautiful adaptation of the real story of actor Robert Walker.
Jenny and David are dancing somewhere
My soul ‘neath their feet and stars in their hair
And me, I’m drinking bourbon and rain
Reduced to a stranger on a train
Robert walker loses his love (Jennifer Jones) to his close friend David O. Selznick who has been known for being a playboy back in the day. Yet, Jennifer leaves him to be with David. But Robert cannot take it and goes through a difficult time accepting the truth, which never happens. He gets hospitalized in a psychiatric center to recover. After getting dismissed, he plays the most famous role of his life in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a train. But the sorrow is still within him, and a year after he dies of depression (overdose) in his home at the age of 32 with the pain of losing love in his heart.
The lyrics is full of cinematic metaphors for Robert walker’s movies. The song itself sounds very theatrical and illustrative. While we are getting dragged into the real life of Robert Walker, it still feels like a drama, like a movie of the dramatic life of Walker going forth and back from his movies to his real life, full of unpleasant similarities and also contradictions.
Now I wait in my grave
Farewell love, farewell liquor
No longer your slave
One touch of Venus, a lifetime of pain
One Touch of Venus is another movie of Robert Walker. It's about love and betrayal and how one touch of Venus causes Eddie (Robert Walker) a never-ending pain. Eddie is the only one left alone.
In the end, we shouldn’t skip the role of the vocalist of Strangers on a train in the song. The torturing raspy vocal scratches your soul and penetrates into your bones. Robert walker is singing from his grave, yelling his sadness and anger into our hearts. And it goes deep because you also might have watched your love being torn by wolves.
I will never be anything
But a stranger on a train
