Third & Fourth Verse

"Maybe we're older
Maybe we're colder
So we cling to our illusion
Seeking future absolution
From the pain"

The first iteration of the third verse of "Boats Against The Current" starts with two lines that were keepers, but Eric was still looking for the perfect conclusion to the stanza when he first committed it to paper. Strutting his lyric-writing prowess, he initially wrote a line that rhymed the word absolution with illusion—a really creative choice. Eric has always had a penchant for writing lyrics that read like poetry. Lines from other songs that come to mind include, "Buried my romantic inclination/deep inside of me/till I fell for you immoderately," from "Starting Over" and "In the spring the sun will shine and make the ice surrender/but it will not warm my heart as long as I remember," from "I Can Remember."


"Maybe we're older
Maybe we're colder
So we disregard solutions
While we cling to our illusions
once again
And we keep remembering when"

It's no surprise that even though he opted for a different set of lines to frame out the third verse, they still read more like a poem than a song.


"Guess it's the season
Must be a reason
'Cause it seems so self defeating
And we can't go on pretending
Nothing's wrong
And the nights are getting so long"

In Eric Carmen: Marathon Man, Eric has admitted that "Boats Against The Current" was not about a romantic relationship, but about the dissolution of his partnership with Jimmy Ienner. "I knew the song was about us," said Ienner. “'Boats Against The Current' expressed exactly who Eric was at that point in time."


"Seasons are changing
Reasons are changing
But the story isn't ending
So we find ourselves pretending
one more day
And the years keep slippin' away"

“At the time I wrote the song I said, ‘This is the most depressing, sarcastic, cynical song I ever wrote," recalled Eric in Eric Carmen: Marathon Man. "It came to a head one day when I was listening to some of the tape from the previous day's recording that I had written the most depressing song ever written in the history of the world. I wrote it with a great deal of cynicism. Since then, I’ve met countless numbers of people who thought it was a positive song. That just flipped me out completely.

“I’d say, ‘How could you think that 'Boats Against The Current' was a positive song?’ They’d say, ‘Well, tomorrow, we’ll run a little bit faster tomorrow.’ They saw it without the cynical side. It totally befuddled me that it just went right by people. If they were optimists, they saw it as a negative song. If they were pessimists, they saw the song as positive. It’s held true with almost everyone that I ever met that had an opinion on that song one way or the other. It never even dawned on me that people could take it any other way than the way I’d written it."

Such is the mystery of music and how it effects people. Sometimes an artist writes a song and the interprestation is exactly as he or she had devised. Other times, like with "Boats," the perception lies in the mind of the listener. Oh, and curiously, I am an optimist that sees it as a positive song :-)