The Gift – This seemingly downtrodden song could have easily been on Annie’s Bare, but it’s one of Diva’s standout tracks. It’s a dark song, full of reflection, resignation and, in the end, renewal. It’s an emotional tour de force of songwriting. True to form, Annie uses rain, as she often has, to highlight her feelings and this song’s conclusion is a deluge of emotions – sweet, nostalgic and hopeful: “I can almost hear the rain falling/ Don’t you know it feels so good?/ So let’s go out into the rain again/ Just like we said we always would.”

Darling don’t you understand
I feel so ill at ease
The room is full of silence and it’s getting hard to breathe
Take this guilded cage of pain and set me free
Take this overcoat of shame
It never did belong to me
It never did belong to me

I need to go outside
I need to leave the smoke
‘Cause I can’t go on living in this same sick joke
It seems our lives have taken on a different kind of twist
Now that you have given me the perfect gift
You have given me the gift

For we have fallen from our shelves
To face the truth about ourselves
And we have tumbled from our trees
Tumbled from our trees

And I can almost…
I can almost feel the rain falling
Don’t you know it feels so good
So let’s go out into the rain again
Just like we said we always would

THE GIFT

Spare percussion, piano, and synth create the warmest, cavernous-sounding stage to frame “The Gift” – Diva’s emotional climax as well as its crowning achievement. The mood is intimate and calming, but like continents slowly shifting, we feel the full glorious seismic eruption with it’s loudest lyric “For we have fallen from our shelves to face the truth about ourselves.”

The song is gorgeously sung like a secret between lovers, but these are not happy individuals. A bomb has been dropped. The bomb being the titular “gift.” We can only imagine what has occurred here between these lovers. Annie Lennox sings with resigned disdain “I need to go outside -I need to leave the smoke – ‘Cause I can’t go on living in this same sick joke. It seems our lives have taken on a different kind of twist – Now that you have given me the perfect gift.” And in the next line a clarity “you have given me the gift.”

So what is this gift? Well, sometimes life throws us a horrible curveball and we end up the better and wiser for it. An uncomfortable truth is revealed, and it’s cataclysmic for a while, but then as a result, we can breathe easier and understand each other better. In the aftermath of a crisis, when the dust has settled, we can go “out into the rain again” – into the world again – and “it feels so good” to make peace with each other, and live again.

A gift, indeed.

– Xaque Gruber

COLLECTABLE RECORD

Well as we know there was no single release for The Gift, so instead here we have a lovely Italian Bootleg CD from Annie’s 1992 Montreaux appearance.

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Eurythmics and DAVE STEWART AND ANNIE LENNOX