From the album Why Can't You - Single
This is a song about begging someone to feel something they just don't feel. Barnes isn't asking for effort or change. He's asking for the impossible: reciprocal emotion that isn't there. The whole song circles that same unanswerable question, trying different angles on a problem that has no solution.
I don't wanna be alone for the rest of my life / Tried to hide my sins now / But where could they lie?
Barnes frames his need for connection as desperation, not romance. Then he shifts to guilt, like his past mistakes are visible no matter where he puts them. The line suggests he knows he's flawed but still expects love to override that.
You would tell me in the summer you could never love another / It's no longer true, now I'm waiting for a phone call
Summer promises aged badly. What felt permanent turned seasonal. The phone call he's waiting for already isn't coming, and he knows it, but he stays by the phone anyway.
Why can't you / Be in love? / Oh, why can't you?
The question is rhetorical but Barnes asks it like an accusation. He knows feelings don't work on command, but he's stuck on the unfairness of it. The repetition makes it sound more like pleading than asking.
And if you were to change your ways / For me, I would cry / 'Cause then I would know if we'd still have hope
He's so starved for proof of love that even a gesture would break him. The conditional tense does all the work here. If. Would. Could. None of this is happening, and he's mourning hypotheticals.
Oh, I'm so in love with you / So can we be in love?
The final line switches from 'why can't you' to 'can we,' softening the demand into a request. It doesn't change the answer, but it shows he's willing to ask gentler if it means a different outcome. It won't.
The song never resolves because the situation can't. Barnes knows he's asking for something that doesn't exist, but he keeps circling back to the same question like repetition might change the answer. It won't, and the song ends right where it started, still waiting for a call that won't come.