As she has mentioned several times in interviews, We Could Be Lovers is basically about a woman's discreet sexual desire, as she explains in this interview by Barry Egan (http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/singer-sharon-corr-im-not-a-good-girl-30547114.html):
"Echoing Simone de Beauvoir's line about “the torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams,” Sharon sings on We Could Be Lovers about the actual reality of women's private sexual longings. “Would I be out of my mind, would I be losing control?” she coos.
I ask her if the song is her saying that we all have those feelings sometimes for other people, who are not our partners? “Yeah,” she says with an honesty that underpins the new record. “I think we do. And I think it is a lie to pretend that we don't. We don't all go through life every day and not, at least once a year, see somebody else that makes you go: ‘God, that person is really goddamn attractive!' It is, basically, the truth.
“But what I am more interested in in that song is exploring it from a woman's point of view. I am not really interested in the man's point of view. We've heard too much about that over the years. It's like — ‘Man is unfaithful but there is no woman involved'. How does that happen? Because, clearly, the vast majority of the time he's clearly doing it with somebody,” she says. “So, for me, in my 40s, I see the world very, very differently.
“And as a woman, I feel that sometimes we just get so pigeon-holed – like, we just want hugs and kisses, whereas, actually, I think we're downright into lust and can make mistakes just as easily as a guy,” says Sharon Helga Corr, in what I can only presume is a reference to infidelity.
This is, perhaps, the most complicated lyrical themes I've ever found in a song written by Shaz so far.
Edge of Nowhere deals with a feeling of loss to some extent, uncertainty, and loneliness, as she asserts in this interview by our very own SteveW
: http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/swang1/sharoncorr.html
"Sometimes it's not telling the story, it's creating the atmosphere. You're creating the feeling of the feeling rather than saying the feeling. I feel very much on 'Edge of Nowhere', I got that real sense of [being] on the outside, the loneliness, the starkness, and the sort of quietness of being on your own and on the road and constantly passing towns and looking in at warm houses and normal lives, being an outsider and wondering if you're living the right life... I like the juxtapositions that run in that song. I like when things contradict themselves but make perfect sense."
As for You Say, I'm not 100% sure but I have a feeling it has something to do with her anxiety. She has never talked about the song in interviews (AFAIK), but one fine day this year after experiencing anxiety attack myself I listened to the song and paid attention to the lyrics for the first time and then it hit me that this might very well be about the writer's battle with anxiety. At least, the lyrics quite reflected what I personally felt during that episode, particularly in this part:
You say you'll leave
But you never go
You say you feel
But you don't let it show
and
You try to be
So many different things
You still don't know
You are everything
But I can't give up
And I can't let go
You scream and shout
I block it all out
And I put you back together again
'Cause nobody falls apart
Like you do
I don't know if that's actually the case, but to me the lyrics picture what someone with anxiety goes through pretty well. The words are fairly abstract, just like the condition itself. I could be wrong, but I really would love to ask her about this...
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