Take The Long Way Home

Agree this is one of their best songs, but you're all missing the point of the song. The important lines are:

"When you look through the years and see what you could have been oh, what might have been, if you'd had more time."

He's been "taking the long way home" so often he's wasted time which he can now not get back. Stay focused. Life is not a dress rehearsal and you won't get a second chance at your best years..

I can see the celebrity angle that the lyrics seem to suggest but I think this song is about a guy who got married young and is expressing regret.

This would be a guy who feels 'part of the crowd' when he's out on the town. He's in the spotlight - meeting new people, having fun, and (of course) meeting new women. The guy is narcissistic - he considers himself a Romeo - a lady's man.

When he got married everything changed. Now he's part of the scenery - he's the joke of the neighborhood (his crowd). His wife thinks he's 'part of the furniture' - but 'she used to be so nice'.

'Take the long way home' would be going out on the town instead of going home to his wife and family. He's married but he's living the single life and his wife thinks he's nuts (which might suggest midlife crisis).

The lyric 'there's no way out' is the feeling this guy has being stuck in a marriage he's unhappy with.

This guy sits back and thinks what could have been if he'd had more time when he was single.

In the end, when he's ready to settle down, no one's going to be there because he never really adapted to marrried life.

Maybe i'm taking the lyrics to literally - but that's my take.

I'm reminded of a story I read about, where a guy out west, not a celebrity, just an ordinary guy, had just left a bar to go home, right before a landslide hit it. He was the only survivor, and here's what he did. He got in his car, and headed east. He said he felt like somebody'd said, here's your life again, see if you can't do better this time. He really did escape.

The beauty here lays in how many ways you can look at it.

Wikipedia has a great quote from the artist, Roger Hodgson, from a "making of Breakfast in America" recording: 'Take The Long Way Home' has a quality about it that just makes me feel warm inside. I don't know if it's the harmonies or the melodies, or whatever, but I never get sick of it. I always saw the song a little ambiguous. It's on two levels. I see 'home' as being internal and external. It's kind of a play on words. Definitely part of the song is about the shallowness of success and getting caught up in a world and success and chasing, being popular, or whatever, is taking 'the long way home'. Because I think 'home' in its deepest sense is inside, is being at peace with oneself. Again it's ambiguous - 'if you're not around' means… you're dead or you couldn't settle down - you couldn't take it and you're off looking for things that are more important. It's a fun song! I remember having a lot of fun writing it but never really having a clear picture of it. It was more… often when I write songs, I go by gut instinct. A line comes to me and they usually do come to me… the best lines come to me rather than me trying to think them up consciously and I just feel they're right and I go with them whether I totally understand the meaning or not.

It is really a great sad song of life. To understand this song just substitude Long with Wrong. Take the long way home is realy take the wrong way home. He married the wrong woman when everyone is telling him he is joke because she is just using him. As he grows he realized she does not love him anymore so he takes a trip to the city lights( Cheap thrills) to get away. He sees himself stuck and can't change things. He wants to go back to the days he had fun with her and how she adored him and made love to him. Home is what the wife make for you. The moral of the story here is if you are shallow in seeking love and physical satisfaction, don't blame anyone but yourself. Life and love are very deep and it is important to have depth in a realationship.

I agree with everything mrjobu said except for what the line "Take the long way home" means. I think this literally means take the long way home. The man does not want to go home to his wife or his life, so he drives around a little while longer every night and takes the long way home.

The meaning is simple... Home is inside you. Don't turn to others or drugs or material things to find yourself, your identity, your happiness. Your true self can only be found by you within you.

Deceptively simple song that holds a great deal of insight to life. I interpret it because it is written in an inspired way about certain interesting aspects of life... from a perspective of someone who has been sort of 'self-actualized' or living out dreams of theirs, to an extent, but it is starting to become apparent that that isn't really reality... that there is some divergence or illusion (my words) to it all... and not meant in any bad way, but it's just something, as it says in the song, that you have to use the same or even deeper parts of that desire and that identity you have within yourself, that ambition, that attraction to life, in order to help yourself reckon with the feeling that you seem to be on the downslope of things and the sooner you accept your lack of ability to do anything about it, the sooner you can introspectively, or perhaps literally, take a long way to where you will find peace next........ oh, and the music itself is absolutely brilliant in the melancholy mixed with an almost triumphant kind of inner peace feeling to complement the music... that harmonica that lingers at the end... there sound is unique but it works perfectly and for that they should be admired for a long time.......

This song explains that we all have dreams, no matter how big or small, but reality will always come and kick you to the curb. People, such as the narrators wife, will make you doubt yourself, but taking time to be alone and find yourself, (hence, taking the long way home for extra thinking and breathing room, I do it all of the time," gives you the chance to make yourself who you want to be. Moral of the story is, that you need to be the person you want to be and not the one others want to see