His last few albums haven’t done anything for me, but between 1990-1995, Cliff Eberhardt was making some of the best Northeastern folk on the market. (It was a small market, admittedly — hell, it still is — but still.) “Ever Since I Lost Your Love” (download), the leadoff track on his 1994 Now You Are My Home album was the first Eberhardt song I heard.

I listened to this album a lot when it came out, and played songs from its excellent followup, 1995’s Mona Lisa Cafe, on the train wreck of a radio show I briefly hosted with Rahul, but I don’t often listen to Cliff Eberhardt anymore — which is why, when Winamp served up this song tonight, it took me back to the sad, skinny dork I was back then. This song probably reminded me of a girl — probably of a girl whose love I’d never had, much less lost — but it makes me smile inside now.

It’s a sad song, as sad as its title would suggest, but beautiful, in that wide-open, acoustic guitar-and-piano Northeastern folk way. If all folk records sounded like this, I’d probably never have gotten bored with the stuff — which would be a terrible thing, because being loud once in awhile is extremely important. I listened to loud stuff back then too, but loud like the Georgia Satellites’ In the Land of Salvation and Sin, steeped in whiskey and regret, at an age when I’d never tasted whiskey and didn’t really have anything to regret.

Now that I’m older, naturally, I’m hardly ever sad and don’t regret much, if anything. I’d like to think the same thing happens to all of us as we get older and wiser and fatter — that we experience the Great Evening Out, where we realize that all is shades of gray, and really, not much besides life and death is really, you know, life and death — but I have no idea if that’s true. Maybe I’m just lucky, or too dumb to know better. Either way, I still like this song.

About the Author

Jeff Giles

Jeff Giles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Popdose and Dadnabbit, as well as an entertainment writer whose work can be seen at Rotten Tomatoes and a number of other sites. Hey, why not follow him at Twitter while you're at it?

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