The Radio Tokyo Tapes
(Ear Movie EM C0027) - 1983

Contains the song:
It Had to Be You (Real Audio)

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It Had to Be You (Joe Nolte, Feb 16, 1981)

It had to be you
Your lips are parted
It had to be you
To lead my heart into this maze
I should have run
I couldn't get away

I fell for you, too
So don't feel proud, girl
I fell for you, too
And you're allowed to lay your claim on me
And now I know
I'll never be more free

I just had to know what it felt like
Had to be sure it was true
Is this love, is that what it feels like
Why did it have to be you

I heard about you
Everyone had a story
And all your glorious misdeeds
I should have run
But I did not believe

It had to be you
You know it started
It had to be you
To lead my heart right to this maze
And now I know
I'll never get away

Then one day I heard a rumor
Making its way to me
That someone had run out
On someone else's dream

It had to be you
You know it started
It had to be you
To hurt me so completely I would cry
You know I very very nearly died

I just had to know what it felt like
Had to be sure it was true
Now I know how bad it can hurt
But why did it have to be you
Why did it have to be you
...

I was on the verge of a musical writer's block that would last from early '81 till about July of 1987. I didn't stop writing, per se, but I wrote fewer songs than before, and most of them were more calculated, less genuinely inspired than the stuff I've done before or since. A dark period, creatively.

This is probably one of the first of those "manufactured" songs (though honors for my first abrogation of creative duty must go to "Isn't Anybody There", coming up next).

The chorus was put together out of two musical phrases that had been lying around for some time, and the verse was musically a fairly wooden attempt to invoke the spirit of "She Don't Know Why".

Lyrically, I have nothing to say. It's a fake song about a fake relationship, and was written just to write something.

Needing a riff, we took a non-recorded Vitus song (called "In Her Eyes"? - have to check), and he did it as a flute instrumental for the opening and the middle part.

My girlfriend at the time was Gwynne Kahn, who reminded me after the fact that her grandfather had written the original "It Had To Be You". Interesting...

—Joe Nolte
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