HERE COMES THAT SONG AGAIN CAPTURES THE UNAVOIDABLE RETURN OF MEMORY AND LONGING IN THE WAKE OF A BROKEN HEART
In the spring of 1960, Roy Orbison was ascending toward his first great commercial breakthroughs, and while the A‑side of his “Only the Lonely” single soared to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, its flip side “Here Comes That Song Again” was a quieter companion piece that nonetheless illuminated key facets of Orbison’s early artistic identity. The track appeared on the single released by Monument Records and was subsequently included as a deep cut on collections and on the LP Roy Orbison Sings Lonely and Blue, situating it within the emotional world he was crafting at the outset of his major‑label career.
If the towering arches of “Only the Lonely” announced Orbison’s arrival as a voice of profound vulnerability and dramatic sweep, “Here Comes That Song Again” acknowledged the mundane cruelty of emotional recurrence: that every melody on the jukebox can feel like a reminder of love lost. The lyrics repetitively invoke the titular phrase, as if trying to outrun an all‑too familiar ache. Orbison’s narrator is trapped in a loop where the music itself becomes the agent of memory, the spark that ignites an old wound. The “song again” is both literal and metaphorical, a tune played once more on a jukebox and a life event playing again in the mind’s private projection booth.
Musically the piece reflects Orbison’s early period at Monument, where producer Fred Foster and Orbison were refining a sound that married the forlorn lyricism of country balladry with the polished phrasing and orchestral touches of the Nashville studio system. Though not a charting single on its own, its placement as a B‑side belies its importance as an emotional counterweight to “Only the Lonely.” The contrast between the sweeping grandeur of the A‑side and the intimate, almost resigned sentiment of the B‑side underscores Orbison’s range: he was an artist capable of monumental melodrama and of quiet, affecting introspection in equal measure.
Lyrically, the song’s refrain is both a lament and a confession. The singer does not confront alienation with fierce defiance but with weary recognition: the song returns, and with it that “old ache,” the same cycle that plays out in so many hearts after love’s departure. In this way, “Here Comes That Song Again” resonates as an early instance of Orbison’s recurring thematic fixation on loss, memory, and emotional persistence. The repeated lines echo like footsteps in a hall of mirrors, each iteration slightly altered by the emotional context of the listener. It is less storytelling than emotional cartography.
Over time the song has endured on compilations and retrospectives not because it defined popular charts but because it enriches our understanding of Orbison the artist: a man whose voice could be at once stoic and exquisitely vulnerable, whose songs mapped the contours of longing with crystalline clarity. Where some performers treated heartbreak as melodrama, Orbison treated it as inevitability, and in “Here Comes That Song Again” we hear not just a song, but the sound of memory circling back, unbidden yet unavoidable, much like the most haunting tunes in all of pop music.