A couple of weeks ago the hubs and I had dinner in a time capsule. It was a steak house on the high plains in Nebraska, but it was like wandering into fifties Vegas—zebra upholstered banquettes, thick carpeting, Sinatra on the soundtrack. A whole lotta Sinatra on the soundtrack. In fact, by the time we’d finished dinner (my annual prime rib), we’d heard most of Frank’s Greatest Hits, including “Softly, As I Leave You.”

Now “Softly” (as it’s usually known) is a legendary Sinatra tune. It’s actually an Italian pop song by Antonio Da Vita and George Calabrese translated into English by Hal Shaper. You can hear Sinatra sing it on YouTube, but lots of other people have recorded it too, including Andy Williams, Doris Day, Michael Bublé, and Shirley Horn. You can see the lyrics here.

The thing is, as I listened to the song this time, I realized something—the singer in this particular song is one prime SOB. To me, the song isn’t romantic, it’s infuriating. Maybe I was too young to understand it when I heard this the first time (and maybe back in the day those lyrics didn’t seem so bad), but boy do I understand it now.

The situation is this. The singer is leaving his Significant Other (I’m going to go with masculine pronouns here because of Sinatra, but it could just as easily be a woman). The SO is asleep and the singer doesn’t want to wake her because she’ll beg him to stay. So he’s just going to tippy-toe away before she wakes up because he can’t “bear the tears” after all the years they’ve spent together. Whether he’ll contact her after he gets wherever he’s going isn’t clear, but right now he’s outa there.

Stop and think about that for a minute. This is a long-term relationship—they’ve been together for years. But the singer is such a chickenshit that he can’t bring himself to take the time to even tell his SO he’s leaving. And why not? Because she’ll cry and it’ll get messy. Moreover, she might try to embrace him or kiss him and, well, he just couldn’t take that, it would just break his heart.

But not enough to get him to be a mensch and stick around to announce his intentions. The SO apparently has no idea this is going to happen. The singer is leaving “long before you miss me,” so we assume the SO is going to be totally in the dark when she wakes up and finds he’s no longer in his accustomed spot next to her. Given old Silver Tonsils’ aversion to unpleasantness, she may never find out exactly why she’s been dumped. He is, as I say, the very definition of a prime SOB.

Why had I never noticed before what a bastard the singer is in this song? I think it’s because the music is so lovely, and the singer’s delivery is typically so dramatic. You hear those quivering tones, those throbbing strings, and you never stop to think about just what words are being sung. But it makes me wonder how many other songs in the Great American Songbook are about jerks and cads. How many songs have I listened to over the years without really hearing them? We’re accustomed to hearing attacks on hip hop and rap, but maybe they’re not the only songs that seem to celebrate things that shouldn’t be celebrated.

At least in the case of “Softly As I Leave You”, I’m listening now. Trust me, the next time I hear it I’m going to be thinking C’mon, lady, wake up and kick his ass!