From the album In My Own Time
This is a song about someone who has convinced herself that staying still is a choice. She frames inertia as autonomy, insisting she takes her own time while simultaneously admitting she wastes it. The beloved is asked to arrive but never actually appears in the verses that follow. What reads as patient self-possession is really someone tending a garden alone, waiting for nothing to change.
Are you around to catch a spark / To take my body in the dark / Honey please leave the day downstairs / Light a candle, I'll let down my hair
The invitation is staged like a seduction but framed as a question, not a certainty. She is asking if he is around, not telling him to come upstairs. The intimacy she describes might not be happening at all.
In my own time, I take my own time / In my own time, I waste my time
She treats taking time and wasting time as equivalent statements, singing them with identical emphasis. If she actually believed autonomy and stagnation were different things, one would land harder than the other.
Don't forget to go outside / To feel the wind to breathe the cold air / The winter branches in these bones
This might be advice to herself, not the absent beloved. The shift from sensory instruction to interior metaphor suggests she is talking herself through basic acts of living, reminding herself to leave the house.
Rose in my hand out in the garden / The feel of dirty fingernails / And when the fence falls down its mending / I'll be right here, I love you still
The declaration of constancy is embedded in images of decay and necessary repair. Staying and loving still does not mean thriving. It means tending to what is broken while insisting nothing has changed.
Follow the thread and now I'm laughing / Follow the thread it has no end
The thread with no end could be her own circular logic. She laughs at the realization that she has been following something that does not lead anywhere, which is either acceptance or resignation dressed up as wisdom.
She would be surprised to learn that her insistence on taking her own time reads less like independence and more like waiting. The entire song describes someone who has not actually gone anywhere, physically or emotionally, despite framing stillness as choice. What sticks is the gap between how she narrates her life and what her life actually contains.