A Quiet Confession of Self-Deception and Loss
In “Making Excuses,” Marty Robbins offers a bittersweet reckoning — a voice gently unraveling the lies we tell ourselves when love slips away.
Though not one of Robbins’s blockbuster singles, “Making Excuses” appears as the opening track on side B of his 1964 Columbia album R.F.D., a record that itself climbed to No. 4 on the Billboard Country Albums chart and stayed there for 28 weeks.
Robbins recorded “Making Excuses” for his R.F.D. album, released in August 1964. While it was never issued as a major single — and thus lacks a clear chart history in his discography — its presence on this deeply personal album is telling: this isn’t bravado or western storytelling, but a quiet internal ballad, a soul speaking in the shadows.
Lyrically, the song is deceptively simple but emotionally rich. Robbins, in vulnerable first person, admits:
“I’ve been makin’ excuses ever since you went away / Makin’ excuses to my heart.”
“I’m usin’ alibis to cover up for all those lies / You’ve been tellin’ me right from the start.”
This isn’t just regret — it’s a confessional about self-deception. The narrator realizes he has spent too much time justifying his partner’s unfaithfulness, masking betrayal with rationalizations, and now that she is gone, he’s stuck repeating the same patterns. He has learned all the wrong lessons:
“Makin’ excuses for the times you let me down / I guess I learned a lot from you / Makin’ excuses every time you came around / That’s all you knew how to do.”
The emotional core is laid bare in the refrain: once she leaves, he’s left with nothing but his own excuses — even to himself. The repeated line “I can’t keep an open mind” suggests a tragic turn: his capacity for hope, forgiveness, or trust has narrowed, curtailed by a cycle of denial.
Musically, the song is spare, typical of Robbins’s more introspective work. According to chord transcriptions, it is rooted in classic country harmonies — gentle guitar lines intertwined with Robbins’s tender vocal. The simplicity of the arrangement feels intentional: by not overshadowing the words, Robbins allows the emotional weight of his lyrics to linger in the silence between lines.
While “Making Excuses” may not carry the mythic sweep of Robbins’s western epics like El Paso, it showcases another facet of his artistry: the ability to articulate heartbreak with humility, to explore pain without melodrama. It’s not a song about gunfights or outlaw tales — it’s a meditation on self-deception, on how we become complicit in our own heartbreak by refusing to face the truth.
Culturally, this song resonates because it speaks to a universal vulnerability: how often do we shield our hearts not only from others, but from ourselves? Robbins’s gentle voice reminds us that sometimes the greatest betrayal comes not from another person, but from the stories we tell to preserve our own dignity.
In “Making Excuses,” Marty Robbins doesn’t just sing — he confides. And in that confession, he offers a poignant mirror to anyone who knows the weight of unspoken truths.