When Desire Grows Tired: Listening to Patty Griffin’s “Useless Desires”
It begins with departure: “Say goodbye to the old street / That never cared much for you anyway.” There is no nostalgia here, no golden light on the pavement. The street is indifferent, and indifference wounds more than cruelty. Then she sings of “the different colored doorways / You thought would let you in one day.” That couplet is devastating in its understatement: waiting for belonging that never comes, staring at doors that look inviting but stay closed. They symbolize all the promises of acceptance that never materialized. It’s not just geography, it’s the architecture of exclusion.
“Goodbye to the old bus stop / Frozen and waiting.” A bus stop is supposed to be where movement begins, but here it’s lifeless, “frozen.” She adds, “The Weekend Edition / Has this town way overrated.” Outsiders romanticize what to her has been suffocating. Anyone who’s ever lived past the postcard gloss of a place understands this sting: the world loves the idea of your town while you can’t wait to escape it.
She walks “across the baseball green / The grass has turned to straw.” Even the field of youth and games has dried up. Then: “A flock of birds tries to fly / Away from where you are.” Nature itself recoils. The birds don’t invite her; they scatter. The stanza closes with “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, old friend / I can’t make you stay.” The three goodbyes echo like a prayer or spell, as though repetition might make the parting stick.
And then the chorus, where the heart of the song lies: “How the sky turns to fire / Against a telephone wire / And even I’m getting tired / Of useless desires.” Against something as banal as a wire, the sky burns. Cosmic and ordinary, together. It’s exhaustion rendered in four lines. Not just of disappointment, but of the longing itself. We are used to thinking of desire as fuel; here it has become residue, heavy and clinging.
The second verse moves inward: “Every day I take a bitter pill / It gets me on my way.” This is survival by numbing, not by healing. The pill is for “the little aches and pains / The ones I have from day to day.” Physical detail grounds the emotional truth: loss and longing live in the body. But the deeper purpose comes next: “To help me think a little less / About the things I miss.” Forgetting is its own ritual. And yet, even in the attempt to forget, memory sneaks in.
Finally, the most piercing confession: “To help me not to wonder how / I ended up like this.” The lyric is quiet, but it lands like a collapse. It’s the question anyone asks in their most private hours: how did the sum of choices, the trusting of particular desires, the waiting at certain doors, lead to this life? It’s not just about the place she’s leaving. It’s about the self she has become.
This is where Griffin’s genius lies; she whispers instead of shouting. She tells her story through bus stops and bird flocks, straw fields and telephone wires. By staying small, she becomes universal. The ordinariness is the heartbreak. We want our losses to feel epic, to justify our grief. But most of the time, they are mundane. They look like errands and doorways and pills. And so when Griffin sings them, we lean closer, because in her whisper we hear our own lives.
There is something almost spiritual in the way she frames desire. It is both necessary and destructive. We cannot live without wanting, but our wanting misleads us. She does not rage against this condition; she sighs at it. The song does not demand resolution. It gives us instead the dignity of fatigue: admitting that some longings will never be fulfilled, and that wishing otherwise only deepens the wound.
When I first heard the song, I thought of all the places I had stood at my own kind of bus stop, certain that something would arrive if I was patient enough. Jobs that dangled promises. Friendships and relationships that looked like doorways, promising entry into something lasting, only to reveal themselves as thresholds to nowhere, fleeting passages that offered the illusion of permanence but led to empty rooms. Years spent watching the sky burn over wires, too tired to keep pretending. Griffin doesn’t scold these choices; she simply names them. And in the naming, there is grace. Recognition is the first step toward release.
Perhaps that is why “Useless Desires” endures as a companion piece for anyone in the act of leaving. Not because it shows the way forward, but because it keeps you company in the silence of departure. It does not offer catharsis or rebirth. It acknowledges the ache of wasted time, the gravity of doors never opened, the quiet terror of wondering how you ended up here. In a culture addicted to reinvention, that honesty is rare.
And maybe that is the gift of the song. It makes you feel less alone when even your own longing begins to bore you. When you are tired of wanting. When the birds lift off and the field turns brittle. When all you can do is whisper goodbye, and trust that the whisper itself will carry you into whatever comes next.
https://open.spotify.com/track/5d8OAW7clgESJAo64wmG48
Impossible Dream album cover. Image copyright is most likely owned by Patty Griffin or ATO Records (the publisher of the work). It is used here solely to illustrate the audio recording in question. Its use qualifies as fair use under U.S. copyright law
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