You Tripped at Every Step is for my money among Elvis's most beautiful songs. It's about alcoholism, but the lyric is compassionate and the music gentle where he might previously have been hateful and noisy. Let me explain a moment...
It starts off with a childhood dressing up session, fumblingly playing in mummy's shoes and lipstick. An early experience together, establishing that the narrator and the person the song's addressed to go back a long way. When he wrote the song in his late 30s, Elvis was reflecting on his past rather than writing from immediate experience. On Brutal Youth's release he said he was looking back over incidents in his life with a compassion and understanding not felt before. His more than a little spite filled back pages bare this out. Professionally, several things had happened:
The Tasmin Archer version of All Grown Up has impressed Elvis. He admired how she'd drawn compassion for the spoilt, angst ridden girl in the song rather than the bristling vitriol he delivered it with on Mighty Like a Rose.
The radically different Juliet Letters, coming inbetween Mighty Like a Rose and this song's home on Brutal Youth, contained such moments too, not least Elvis quoting a fan letter from a female soldier in the desert during the first Iraq War (I Thought I'd Write to Juliet). She baldy tells Elvis his songs, along with thoughts of her family, comfort her fear. Elvis doesn't judge her for having been induced to join up because of the college grant the army gave her - he'd not always been so understanding of military types in his songs.
From the off Elvis's work has been so broad that there are exceptions (notably Shipbuilding) but You Tripped at Every Step was unusual in being such a compassionate ballad. The lyrics are relatively straightforward, not oblique or pun and bile filled. Elvis said it's a 'candid reminiscence', though how much is fiction one doesn't know. Adding to this general feeling, the Brutal Youth CD features childhood pictures, including little Elvis dressing up.
You Tripped at Every Step is another booze song but from a different angle, about the narrator's relationship to an alcoholic. It has a resignation that the person may never change, which comes from knowledge of their traits as a child, their every step. The lyric moves from childhood to grown up good times, the character high spiritedly singing along to a cheap pop tune ('that starts in "I" and ends in "you" / Like many famous pop songs do') but showing signs of alcoholism ('You would sing along with little tell tale staggers / While dancing on daggers / Though they were killing you').
The narrator's tried to help them before: 'And I would run to catch you anytime you'd call / Only you drank that potion and went out of control...Let me take your hand / Put down that frying pan' The frying pan presumably just one implement the person wields as an alcoholic rage consumes them, causing the narrator to take cover: 'Darkenss would become me / Underneath the table / As the fury raged around the house'. The 'cartoon mouse' reference, although it seems to be about the narrator in their hiding place, also brings a note of Tom and Jerry mayhem to the scene. Nonetheless, the music doesn't express this aggression - as it might have earlier in Elvis's career.
The scene's reminiscent of the drunken domestic violence in Wave a White Flag on the My Aim is True reissue ('When I hit the bottle there's no telling what I'll do / I'll take your pretty face and turn it black and blue…Meet me in the kitchen and I'll beat you in the hall...'). Perhaps You Tripped at Every Step is about a married couple as well (hard to tell) but it certainly has compassion, unconditional love even. The rage subsided, the song ends in tears: 'Before you start to cry / "Don't ever leave me"' and exits with a beautiful coda repeating and harmonising the title, almost like running comforting fingers through the character's hair as they succumb to drunken sleep.
Thoughts on You Tripped at Every Step
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Mr. Misery
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This has such a lilting melody and the lyrics chronicle affectionately but unsentimentally a lifelong friendship and the destructive effects of alcohol ("You drank that potion and went out of control"). It made my top 15 list of all time favorite EC songs, and I have only a little to add to the thorough and outstanding analysis given here.
The imagery is artfully suffused with childhood references throughout, even the present day troubles are refracted through that prism--the undetected mouse evokes Saturday morning cartoons, and "Let me take your hand/ Put down that frying pan" (such a great line!) suggests comic book imagery.
"Darkness would become me," he sings, suggesting a sadness so deep that it becomes part of him as he contemplates the demise of the childhood friend he once knew. This resonates with me for personal reasons.
Two minor notes: (1) I think the lyric is "balancing on daggers" not "dancing on daggers." (2) I really love the spiteful vitriol of Elvis's version of 'All Grown Up'!
I'm surprised that no one else has commented on this thread, but then again your analysis is so comprehensive that it stands on its own. I appreciated it very much.
The imagery is artfully suffused with childhood references throughout, even the present day troubles are refracted through that prism--the undetected mouse evokes Saturday morning cartoons, and "Let me take your hand/ Put down that frying pan" (such a great line!) suggests comic book imagery.
"Darkness would become me," he sings, suggesting a sadness so deep that it becomes part of him as he contemplates the demise of the childhood friend he once knew. This resonates with me for personal reasons.
Two minor notes: (1) I think the lyric is "balancing on daggers" not "dancing on daggers." (2) I really love the spiteful vitriol of Elvis's version of 'All Grown Up'!
I'm surprised that no one else has commented on this thread, but then again your analysis is so comprehensive that it stands on its own. I appreciated it very much.
Thanks to you both for your thoughts and additions, much appreciated. Good points all, not least balancing and McCartney. I was thinking about those Tom and Jerry cartoons too, where one of them gets a frying pan shaped indent on their head! And you're right, it does continue the childhood theme perfectly. Maybe one day I'll write my book (everyone has one apparently!). Been listening to all of Brutal Youth this weekend - it is great. Maybe you want to kick off another song sometime?
Thing is I don't have much musical knowledge. The late Ian MacDonald's book on every Beatles song, Revolution in the Head, is the best example. I implore you all to get it if you haven't already. He'd written about a lot of music, classical too, so he knew his stuff. Elvis deserves a book like this, even if his songs couldn't possibly be as epoch making as Lennon and McCartney's (or McCartney and Lennon's as Paul would have us say these days).