Good Housekeeping's Throwback Thursday, Mad Men Edition: "Lost Horizon"

"Ain't No Mountain High Enough" by Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson
(re-released by Diana Ross in 1970)

If you need me, call me
No matter where you are,
No matter how far.
Just call my name,
I'll be there in a hurry
On that you can depend and never worry.

No wind (no wind),
No rain (no rain),
Nor winter's cold
Can stop me, babe.
(Oh, babe) baby (baby)
If you're my goal.

No wind (no wind),
No rain (no rain)
Can stop me, babe,
If you're my goal.

I know, I know you must follow the sun
Wherever it leads
But remember
If you fall short of your desires
Remember life holds for you one guarantee:
You'll always have me.

And if you should miss my lovin'
One of these old days,
If you should ever miss the arms
That used to hold you so close,
Or the lips that used to touch you so tenderly,
Just remember what I told you
The day I set you free.

Ain't no mountain high enough,
Ain't no valley low enough,
Ain't no river wild enough
To keep me from you.

Ain't no mountain high enough,
Ain't no valley low enough
(Say it again),
Ain't no river wild enough
To keep me from you.

Ain't no mountain high enough,
Nothing can keep me
Keep me from you.

Ain't no mountain high enough,
Ain't no valley low enough
(Say it again),
Ain't no river wild enough
To keep me from you.

Ain't no mountain high enough,
Nothing can keep me
To keep me from you.

Ah, the stalker's anthem. Probably something Don Draper heard on the radio right after "Sealed With a Kiss" on his long drive out to Racine, WI, in Mad Men Episode 7.12, "Lost Horizon."

Or probably something he heard before he made the split decision to take that sudden detour in the first place.

It seemed to me at first that Don was on his way to Milwaukee to get some firsthand knowledge of the Miller brewing plant, to one-up all those jacket-less creative director clones in the McCann Erickson boardroom. Wishful thinking, I guess. I'd forgotten Don's just not that diligent anymore. At least, not about work.

Good Housekeeping, September 1970
(rare weight loss ad for men)

There were clues throughout this episode and previous ones this season that he might bolt like this. In "The Forecast," he couldn't conceive of the company's future, let alone his own. And, as many recappers have pointed out, he's had so many things coincidentally stripped away from him the past few episodes—his marriage to Megan, his torch for Rachel, his dignity (though he did that to himself long ago—it's just worse this season with the various bedmates), his daughter's respect (though that's likely only temporary—he's earned it back before), the respect of some employees, his money (but only one of his many millions), his furniture, his apartment, his office, his ability to seduce Betty…and now his creative autonomy. What's left, really? His hat?

It's almost a perfect setup for leaving it all behind.

Good Housekeeping, September 1970

And notice how excited he got at the prospect of moving to L.A. in "Time & Life"; the old Don was back and he was ready for action. Writing pitches, coming up with a plan, leading the charge. It seems whenever Don gets a glimmer of a new idea, any new idea, he thinks that's the thing—the thing that will make his life great and finally bring him some happiness.

Except it never is, is it? He eventually tires of every new thing. Every latest model of woman (and Matthew Weiner does refer to his actresses this way, though it's not meant to be sexist—he's described Betty as being very 1940s, Jane Seigel as early 1960s and Megan as late 1960s) eventually bores him.

I've quoted it before, and I'll quote it again: As Dr. Faye Miller said, he "only likes the beginnings of things."

Which really all goes back to a season one episode called "The Hobo Code":

Hobo [lighting a cigarette]: Smoke?
Dick [probably around 8 years old]: No.
Hobo: Oh, he speaks.
Dick: I'm supposed to tell you to say your prayers.
Hobo: Prayin' won't help you from this place, kid. Best keep your mind on your mother; she'll probably look after you.
Dick: She ain't my mama.
Hobo: We all wish we were from some place else, believe me.
Dick: Aint'n ya heard? I'm a whore-child.

Hobo: No. I hadn't heard anything about that.
Dick: You don't talk like a bum.
Hobo: I'm not. I'm a gentleman of the rails. For me, every day is brand-new. Every day's a brand-new place, people, what have you.
Dick: So, you got no home. That's sad.
Hobo: What's at home? I had a family once, wife, job, a mortgage. I couldn't sleep at night tied to all those things. And then Death came to find me.
Dick [looking bewildered]: Did you see him?
Hobo: Only every night. So one morning I freed myself, with the clothes on my back. Goodbye. Now I sleep like a stone; sometimes under the stars, the rain, the roof of a barn, but I sleep like a stone.
Dick: So where do you go?

Hobo: Tomorrow I'll be leaving this place, that's for certain. If Death was comin' any place, it's here, kid. Creepin' around every corner. Here [pulls out chalk]...you're an honorary: This is how we talk to each other; on the front gate of every house, there's a mark. It's a code, just like you heard on the radio.

See, that's a pie—it means "The food here is good."








This one—that means "Watch out for the nasty dog."






This one here—that means "A dishonest man lives here."

This one—that means "Tell a sad story." [Tosses chalk to Dick.]
Don't be scared, kid. You ain't a man yet.





The implication here, of course, is that once you are a man, life gets pretty terrifying.

The day after this exchange, the hobo (who remains nameless) goes to receive his pay from Archibald, Dick's father, which had been promised to him after a day's work. Archibald pretends to have forgotten all about it, and tells him to be on his way. Dick runs after the hobo and stops by a post at the end of their property. Sure enough, carved into the post is the code for "a dishonest man." And this symbol is not written in chalk—it's carved into the wood with a knife. Which can only mean that it's been there for a while—another traveler, who'd been there before, likely carved it. So this hobo is not the first Archibald has screwed over.

This was Dick's Sally-catching-him-in-the-act-with-Sylvia moment. Once he knew his father couldn't be trusted, surely his life view changed forever (at the end of the episode, he wakes Bobby and tells him tenderly that he'll "never lie to him"—if only that were true). It's why he remembered it so sharply in that season one episode, and in the one that followed it, "Shoot"—the first in which Jim Hobart tried to woo him over to the dark side.

Don manages to get a bonus from Bert Cooper in "The Hobo Code" and then his pay raised by Roger Sterling in "Shoot," all because he's seen the mysterious gifts arriving from Hobart in the office, and he's concerned he might lose Don. In the end of the episode, Roger asks Don what made him decide to stay.

Don: I see no reason to leave...maybe I see a million.
Roger: A million. Is that what it's going to cost me? I was thinking more like…40.
Don: Forty-five is good.
Roger: I'm not going to be a little girl and ask you why you stayed. I know it's not money. And I hope it's not to keep your foot on Pete Campbell.
Don: I like the way you do business.
Roger: Well, I try to be as civilized as you can be.
Don: No contract.
Roger: Forty-five, with no security. What's in it for me?
Don: If I leave this place one day, it will not be for more advertising.
Roger: What else is there?
Don: I don't know…life being lived? I'd like to stop talking about it and get back to it.
Roger: I've worked with a lot of men like you, and if you had to choose a place to die, it'd be in the middle of a pitch.
Don: I've done that. I want to do something else.

It's no coincidence that part of this clip was shown at the start of "Lost Horizon." Though Weiner only showed the bit where Roger talks about dying in the middle of a pitch meeting. The part I'm interested in is where Don says he wouldn't go back to advertising if he left Sterling Cooper—that he'd actually live his life.

Because I think that may be what he's about to do.

Also, just to be clear, that hobo he met as a youth—he wasn't a bum in the traditional sense. Dick points out to him that he doesn't talk like one. This was the early 1930s, this exchange, a time when over 20 percent of the American population was out of work. Many men just plain gave up looking and took to the rails, and the conductors were less vigilant about throwing them off. The life this man is leading is not the most abnormal one. And while Don's family farm does not appear to be in the Dust Bowl, several farms suffered then and they could use the extra hands if a stranger came along.

A stranger.

Who knows if the hobo's tale is completely true. Don's story about offering a free refrigerator filled with beer certainly isn't. But he's "playing the stranger" all the same. And the reception he receives is somewhat similar.

Good Housekeeping, September 1970
(this is what "harvest gold" looks like)

Good Housekeeping, September 1970

Don's hosts only allow him to stay for an hour or so, though, not overnight. It is now 1970, not 1932. There's no way they will be as hospitable. They are almost as religious, though. Diana's ex-husband tells Don that he lost his daughter to God and his wife to the Devil. He tells Don he can't save Diana, because only Jesus can. And he says maybe Don should look into letting Jesus save him, too.


Probably not the best advice for someone like Don. After all, in "The Hobo Code," he wins over Belle Jolie when he says this, in one of his all-time greatest pitches:

"You're a nonbeliever. Why should we waste time on Kabuki? You've already tried your plan and you're number four. You've enlisted my expertise, and you've rejected it to go on the way you've been going. I'm not interested in that. You can understand. Listen, I'm not here to tell you about Jesus. You already know about Jesus. Either he lives in your heart, or he doesn't."

It's a bit of a non-sequitor of a line, and Don is almost certainly a "nonbeliever" himself, having been judged his whole young life by his stepmother as tainted by original sin, through no wrongdoing of his own. Back in 1932, when the hobo tells Abigail that young Dick (who's busy digging holes for no reason—foreshadowing what he'd be doing years later in Korea when he'd abandon his true identity forever) reminds him of himself, she says, "That doesn't surprise me at all." Because Dick is lower than dirt to her, a constant reminder of her ineptitude.

One thing Don does seem to believe in is the promises told in art and literature. I've been hoping that we may see a bit more of what leads him to enlist in the army this season—just one last flashback!—and as we've only two episodes left, the likelihood of that happening is low. Plus, the actor who plays young Dick, Brandon Killham, isn't slated to appear in any episodes, per IMDB, and Jon Hamm has to be too old to pull off that 20-something heavy makeup. But I digress.

When Dick/Don went to join the army, the real Don asked him if he'd seen movies about it. And Don has told Diana this season that he wanted to move to New York because he'd read about it, and seen so much about it in the movies.

Joan Didion moved to New York around the same time as Don, in the real-life1950s anyway. She described that experience profoundly in "Goodbye to All That" (her essay about leaving the city for good and moving to Los Angeles):

"It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was....

"In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later, but perhaps you will see that as we go along. Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at 20 and come out a good deal older, and on a different street. But most particularly I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city of only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young....

Joan Didion

"I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child...New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live. But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lenin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions ('Money' and 'High Fashion' and 'The Hucksters'), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live' in Xanadu."

"An infinitely romantic notion"—sounds like Don's whole life. Or at least his whole life as Don Draper. Because in a way, Don Draper is New York.

This essay wasn't published until 1967, and it's never been mentioned on the show, so it's doubtful whether Don would have read it. But he has read a book that was written around the same time as this essay, but published 10 years earlier. He mentions it to the apparition of Bert Cooper in his car: On the Road.

Though Jack Kerouac based his book on experiences he'd had around the same time as Joan Didion's, he was driven to dream about leaving the city far before she even put pen to paper about it:

"Although my aunt warned me that he would get me in trouble, I could hear a new call and see a new horizon, and believe it at my young age; and a little bit of trouble or even Dean's eventual rejection of me as a buddy, putting me down, as he would later, on starving sidewalks and sickbeds—what did it matter? I was a young writer and I wanted to take off. 

"Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me."

Jack Kerouac

This is the story of a man who dreams of heading West to find the meaning of life, one he can't find in a city he considers "beat." From Encyclopedia Brittanica: "[The Beat Movement's] adherents, self-styled as "beat" (originally meaning "weary," but later also connoting a musical sense, a "beatific" spirituality and other meanings) and derisively called "beatniks," expressed their alienation from conventional, or "square," society by adopting an almost uniform style of seedy dress, manners and "hip" vocabulary borrowed form jazz musicians. Generally apolitical and indifferent to social problems, they advocated personal release, purification and illumination through the heightened sensory awareness that might be induced by drugs, jazz, sex or the disciplines of Zen Buddhism. Apologists for the Beats, among them Paul Goodman, found the joylessness and purposelessness of modern society sufficient justification for both withdrawal and protest."

It's odd to think of Don reading the Beat manifesto, though, especially when you remember how he reacted to Midge's beatnik friends in "The Hobo Code." They criticize him for being part of "the system"; they tell him that he is creating the lie. He tells them that there is no system. He seems to think they are fooling themselves.

Mad Men, "The Hobo Code"

Yet, in "Lost Horizon," Don finds himself picking up a hitchhiker who could just as easily be Donovan as he could be Llewynn Davis. That is to say, the beatnik and hippie ethoses aren't all that far apart, though Jack Kerouac never wanted to be associated with the latter. In one of his last interviews, on William Buckley's "Firing Line," he told political activist Ed Sanders, "I made myself famous by writing 'songs' and lyrics about the beauty of things I did and ugliness, too. You made yourself famous by saying, 'Down with this, down with that, throw eggs at this, throw eggs at that!' Take it with you. I cannot use your refuse; you may have it back."

Though Kerouac, a notorious alcoholic, was supposedly drunk in this interview, he speaks a truth for his and Don's entire generation (which I've hinted at before). They were raised to work hard and pursue success cautiously, to achieve things within the system that their parents could not. As Neil Howe puts it in "The Silent Generation: 'The Lucky Few,'" "The Silent started out as the children of crisis. They grew up while older people were fighting wars and making great sacrifices on their behalf. Childrearing in America, already more protective for the G.I.'s, approached the point of suffocation. When the Silent began coming of age after World War II, they tiptoed cautiously in a post-crisis social order that no one wanted to disturb. Unlike the G.I.'s, they rarely talked about 'changing the system,' but instead about 'working within the system.' Because they didn't want anything to go on their 'permanent records' and kept their heads down during the McCarthy era, Time gave them the label 'Silent' in a famous 1951 essay."

Good Housekeeping,
September 1970

Good Housekeeping, September 1970

The biggest problem with growing up silent (as young Dick is usually portrayed in Don's flashbacks—children then were better seen, not heard) was that this generation had a hard time developing their identities. They might have been able to achieve great financial success, the greatest of any generation in that century, perhaps, but by midlife, they didn't know who they were. This is the generation that created the term "midlife crisis," what Don is clearly currently going through. The Beats (who hated the term "beatnik," by the way) just realized this problem of inauthenticity a little earlier than most.

And the hippies...well the Beats just thought they were lazy as hell. They didn't have the same grit, the same passion. They didn't want to experience life in all its intensity and realness—they wanted to reject their parents' ambition and conservative values and be free to love on their own terms and find peace. The Beats wanted romance, rugged and raw, sort of like Don. The hippies wanted to live in a utopia. A lost horizon.

But Don has always been torn on this. Because as a creative person, he's a bit of a Beat at heart—its why he embraces novelty so strongly, and why he's able to see a universality that a lot of people lacking depth can't see. Creatives tend to maintain an outsider status whether they want to or not, and this is who Don is, regardless of his impoverished past. His secret identity is meant to conceal that past and enable him to fit into a world of his making. The trouble though, is that though he sought out to create a new life, even the act of maintaining a false face to the world requires some kind of conforming. And while achieving financial success and a glamorous life has certainly helped him reach his goal of rejecting his parents' world and experience, he is left unfulfilled. Because becoming an adult involves doing more than just rejecting your parents' values—it has to do with fulfilling who you truly are.

So Don has always had empathy for hobos, and certainly sees himself as a vagabond, a drifter, a stranger (the hobo in his childhood called him an "honorary"). But this hippie he's picked up on the side of the road is a different breed.

Hobos aren't the only people Don's always had empathy for. He's one of the only male characters on this entire series who's never made a sexist comment about women having careers. He did emphasize to Betty in "Shoot" how important her job as a mother was, but that was mostly due to his own yearning to have a good mother. Maybe it's because he grew up around "working girls," euphemistically speaking, but Don has always been an aid in their upward climb. He even asks Joan this episode if he can intervene in her current situation.

And just as Don has had enough of his "career," and is finally trying to live, Joan and Peggy and Betty are all clinging to theirs. They are blazing the trails for women that the Silent generation blazed for men 20 years prior. And Joan Didion is one of them. And yet she, too, got sick of New York City by the end of the 1960s. It's interesting Don is so aching to leave, when you consider that just a year prior, he was willing to do anything in his power to keep his old position at SC&P.

But now we've entered the 1970s, and New York and advertising are an entirely different world. As Pete puts it, "The city has become a toilet." Joan Didion observed that the city was filled with only the rich and the poor, but by the mid-1970s it was crime-ridden, nearing bankruptcy and overall terrifying. With the economic crisis looming, Don is surely better off in a place like L.A. (the appeal of which I talked about here) or wherever else he chooses to go. Because the New York he saw in the movies, the one he tried to get Diana excited about—well, it just doesn't exist anymore, at least not at this point in history.

1970s New York City, Leland Bobbe

This was a great time in New York for struggling artists and musicians, though, because they could actually afford to live in the city proper, a possibility that is now just a distant memory. Here's an amazing documentary on that, the BBC's "Once Upon a Time in New York: The Birth of Hip Hop, Disco and Punk." Watch the whole thing. You'll thank me.

This half-season of Mad Men often utilizes the technique of reflecting back on memorable scenes from the first few seasons—the first season, especially. It's for the true fans, those who remember these scenes with nostalgia. The rest of us are just loving what we're seeing right now but we're not quite sure why. But it's because we've seen some version of it before.

Mad Men, "The Hobo Code"

For example, Peggy's day—and night—of drinking Vermouth with Roger calls back to "The Hobo Code" (I know, I know, enough already—but it was a rich episode!), when she won the Belle Jolie account and Don offered her a drink to celebrate. Normally, as Don's secretary, she was the one who supplied the ice while the men day-drank and laughed, but this time she was invited to the party and she couldn't have been more thrilled.

So for Roger to ask her to buy him a bottle of alcohol and for her to say no speaks volumes about how far she's come. And Roger sits there and drinks only with her, not with any other men, with seemingly no romantic intentions at all. How many times have we seen Roger do that with a woman? Perhaps, he just misses his daughter and feels the need to pass on wisdom to someone…anyone. And Peggy's smart enough to know that she should stick around to receive it.

Good
Housekeeping,
September 1970

(And roller skating was huge in the 1970s—Peggy is just a little ahead of everyone else trend-wise, as per usual. Again, being ahead on trends was not the case for her in the first season of this show [see above left]—in 1960, she was still dressing like it was 1955.)

Mad Men, "The Hobo Code"

In that same season one episode, Joan tells Peggy that she'd thought she was only becoming a copywriter so she could get closer romantically to Paul Kinsey. She can't comprehend that a woman in that office could have any motivation other than meeting a man, making a living and having a little fun. And now look at her.

Good Housekeeping, September 1970

Contrary to what Roger tells her, it is not "all about the money." Now she is the one who says things like, "I finally got the job of my dreams." When offered to be whisked away to Bermuda (the second mention of it this episode—it reached a peak of popularity in the 1970s, somewhat due to the "print ads" Hobart mentions; it was also once considered "the isle of devils," and Hobart loved it, so go figure), she tells the man in question that he can't tell her when she needs to go somewhere. Something tells me Joan is not going to go down without a fight in this McCann debacle.

Good Housekeeping, September 1970

Every woman on this show has benefitted from second-wave feminism, though this episode brought it more to the forefront. And though I did point out Joan's Ladies' Home Journal in her living room last week, and August 1970 was the month of the magazine's "feminist issue" as well as the date of the famous women's rights march down 5th Avenue, I found it strange that Joan would be so well-versed in all this, and that she'd present it to Jim Hobart so assertively.

Good Housekeeping, September 1970

On my second viewing, I was able to see the argument from his side, as well. I don't think he really knows what Ferg has been up to—something tells me his employees hide their sexist machismo from him. He is likely so out of touch with his employees that he truly does believe it when he says, "the women are happy here." Also, as I think I've mentioned before, "sexism" was barely even a word yet in 1970. So, "sexist" for them equals "normal."

Joan will end this series a career woman. She just has it in her. In fact, though Ferg tells her it is easier for a woman to be the boss of men if she's a "creative," like Peggy, history tells us that wasn't necessarily the case—and still isn't today.

In The Globe and Mail, journalist Susan Krashinsky said, "Women's difficulty rising to leadership roles is somewhat particular to the creative departments: media planning and buying, account services and other areas of the industry tend to be more balanced." Only 3 percent of worldwide creative directors are women—that's today's statistic, not 1970's. And it's largely because of the lifestyle required—e.g., staying up until 3 a.m. working on an ad (a la Peggy's night with Don in "The Suitcase")...or having a few drinks with Roger Sterling. As long as Peggy stays "career-primary," as this article puts it—meaning she will not get married or have kids—she'll be on her way to success.

Because everyone brews coffee right on the stovetop, right?

Good Housekeeping, September 1970
(one of many emerging ads for
instant coffee that year)

And after her viral marketing stunt for Sugarberry Ham (which Don dismissed as a cheap tactic immediately) in season four, Peggy is sure to fit in as a creative director in the 1970s, because "positioning" became the name of the game then. Advertising oversaturation in America started in this decade, especially when you consider how much TV was being watched. With so many more ads, companies had to figure out a way to stand apart from the competition—that's why a creative director like Don Draper is such a prize to Hobart, because he knows how competitive the market has become. At the same time, Don isn't interested in competing anymore—he's at the top of his game and wants to stay there. Peggy, on the other hand, is hungry. And she has a good instinct for competitive ads; in "Severance," she tells Topaz Pantyhose it's better not to mention another brand, to never make yourself appear to be second.

She will surely do well in the cola wars (and I'm seeing more and more ads for Pepsi in 1970 Good Housekeepings as the months progress). After all, the "Mean Joe Green" Coca-Cola ads of the late 1970s were written by a woman—and she worked for McCann.

Even Betty seems to be on some sort of path to empowerment now. And based on previews of the next episode, she's bound to start asserting herself more because of it. In the first season's "Shoot," there's a scene in the kitchen of the Draper residence where Betty rubs Don's shoulders, trying to butter him up into letting her model for Jim Hobart.

Don agrees, and says he wants to support her in whatever she wants to do, despite his initial surprise (there's that feminism again...um, mixed in with the womanizing...). In "Lost Horizon," Don is now the masseur, and it's he who needs validation, permission to have the "life" he wants. He's not sure what that new life is yet, but he's lost his way...almost as much as Betty had in that first season.

Maybe even more.


As always, here are our doppelgangers from this weeks' episode:

Meredith's plan for Don's new pad

Good Housekeeping, September 1970
(real-life interior design of the time)

Joan's secretary, Beverly

Good Housekeeping, August 1970

Joan's 1970s hair

Good Housekeeping, September 1970

Joan's 1970s frosted white nail polish

Good Housekeeping, September 1970

The ladies of McCann

Good Housekeeping, September 1970

Peggy's shoes

Good Housekeeping, 1970

Until next time, "Believe me, I'm not scary. Organ music is scary."

"Here I Go Again," by Whitesnake (1982; the original version of this
song used the word "hobo," not "drifter")

I don't know where I'm goin'
But I sure know where I've been.
Hanging on the promises in songs of yesterday.
An' I've made up my mind,
I ain't wasting no more time.
Here I go again.
Here I go again.

Tho' I keep searching for an answer
I never seem to find what I'm looking for.
Oh Lord, I pray you give me strength to carry on,
'Cause I know what it means
To walk along the lonely street of dreams.

An' here I go again on my own
Goin' down the only road I've ever known.
Like a drifter, I was born to walk alone.
An' I've made up my mind,
I ain't wasting no more time.

I'm just another heart in need of rescue.
Waiting on love's sweet charity.
An' I'm gonna hold on for the rest of my days
'Cause I know what it means
To walk along the lonely street of dreams.

An' here I go again on my own.
Goin' down the only road I've ever known.
Like a drifter, I was born to walk alone.
An' I've made up my mind,
I ain't wasting no more time.
But here I go again,
Here I go again,
Here I go again,
Here I go...

An' I've made up my mind,
I ain't wasting no more time.

An' here I go again on my own.
Goin' down the only road I've ever known.
Like a drifter, I was born to walk alone.
An' I've made up my mind,
I ain't wasting no more time...

But here I go again,
Here I go again,
Here I go again,
Here I go,
Here I go again...