The Cure’s Robert Smith explains the lyrics and inspiration behind ‘Alone’

nme.com:

Robert Smith has discussed the lyrics and inspiration for The Cure’s new single ‘Alone’ in a new video.The Cure shared the track, the lead single from their upcoming album ‘Songs Of A Lost World’, on September 26, and it marks the first time the six-piece have shared new studio material since their 2008 album ‘4:13 Dream’.Smith said at the time that the track was inspired by the Ernest Dowson poem Dregs, and he’s expanded on the inspiration further in a video uploaded to The Cure’s official YouTube channel.“I rediscovered a poem by Ernest Dowson, an English poet – it’s called Dregs,” he began in the video. “I’ve got a book and I jot down over the years things that I think [are] interesting’.

Some of it’s couplets, some of it’s rhymes, some of it’s words … it’s not a journal, a lot of it’s gobbledygook,” he laughed.He continued, “Occasionally I’ll turn a page and there’ll be something and I think, ‘Oh, that’s great,’ and I’d actually transcribed this poem – I don’t know when – and I was struggling to find the right imagery for for ‘Alone’ … this poem, the opening line, I thought, ‘That’s it’.“It was in the back of my mind … However I was writing it, it wasn’t poetic, and suddenly I discovered this and I thought, ‘That’s it, that’s what’s been bugging me,’ because I knew what the song was supposed to be about.”The song begins with an otherworldly instrumental intro, before the lyrics come in at around the halfway mark – with a line the band have been teasing for a while. “This is the end of every song that we sing / The fire burned out to ash and the stars grown dim with tears,” Smith sings, echoing the first couple of lines in the poem: “The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof / This is the end of every song man.