The Cure’s Robert Smith Says Writing About Brother’s Death on ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ Helped Him ‘Enormously’
Robert’s Smith’s songwriting in The Cure has long focused squarely on melancholy and dark themes. But on the band’s long-awaited upcoming album, Songs of a Lost World (Nov. 1), he takes on a bit of real-life heartache that he said inspired him to pay tribute to his late brother. In a nearly two-hour interview with British journalist Matt Everitt — which can be unlocked by flipping to the album’s release date in Roman numerals here — Smith explains the origins of “I Can Never Say Goodbye.”
“I wrote this song a lot of different ways, until I hit on a very simple narrative of what actually happened on the night he died,” he said of the song dedicated to his late older brother, Richard, while also copping to the Cure’s songs always having an edge of the “fear of morality” in them. “It went all around the houses and I went everywhere with this song to sum up how I felt. In the end, it turned into a reasonably bleak little vignette.”
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The singer said he struggled to balance the “outpouring” of emotion he felt at the time with the need to write a coherent song, admitting that some earlier versions of the tune were “too overwrought” for general consumption. For the record, he loved them, but other people suggested they night be “too much.” In fact, when Smith, 65, performed “Goodbye” live on the Cure’s 2023 tour, he said he had trouble not going over the top and being overcome by emotion in concert.
Smith continued, “I wrote the song about it, and the music itself was what I wanted to breathe. I didn’t want the words to dominate the song, in a way that the music can become a backdrop to what you’re singing. In this, I think the music is more important than what I’m singing in a way. It’s a very difficult song to sing. People say ‘cathartic’ too much, but it was. It allowed me to deal with it, and I think it’s helped me enormously.”
Realizing he hasn’t got “that many more albums” in his future, Smith said he wanted his new songs to “mean something,” as opposed to some older Cure songs he said were not as personal. “On this album they all matter [to me],” he said of songs such as “I Can Never Say Goodbye,” which finds him singing, “Something wicked this way comes/ To steal away my brother’s life/ Something wicked this way comes/ I could never say goodbye.”
“When you’re younger, you romanticize [death], even without knowing it. Then it starts happening to your immediate family and friends and suddenly it’s a different thing. It’s something that I struggled with lyrically: how to put this into the songs? I feel like I am different person than I was when we last made an album. I wanted that to come through.”
Songs of a Lost World is the Cure’s long-awaited follow-up to 2008’s 4:13 Dream; so far the group has previewed the LP with the songs “A Fragile Thing,” as well as “Alone.”
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