NOTE: This is the fourth in a special week-long series.
"She was cool, she was hot, she was smoking a lot at the end of the bar." So begins the dramatic events of Gary Allan's "He Can't Quit Her" off his 2005 album, Tough All Over.
A desperate man gets hooked, not on drugs or gambling, but on the misperceived love of a prostitute. The songs does a beautiful job of likening the doomed man's obsession with the call girl to other addictions. Allan sings "she's like needle to a junkie, like whiskey to a drunk, she's like poker to a gambler, like a bullet in a gun." Unfortunately, the last phrase here offers a little foreshadowing that the green-eyed monster eventually costs the horn-dog his life.
The song captures perfectly the hopeless want and need the lonely guy feels and, as awful an ending to his life as it is, the imagery the song and Allan's vocals display are the stuff of country magic.
Sergio del Limónar
I always thought that the horn dog shot the womans new man???
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