Angry All the Time- Revised

In Tim McGraw’s song, Angry All the Time, there is a conflict between a husband’s feelings and his job as a husband. Throughout the song the husband is forcefully speaking to his wife about their relationship. The husband is torn between staying with her, and his feelings about doing what is best for him. The husband is tired of the difficulty of their relationship. He is feeling as though he must get out of the marriage in order to carry on. However, the conflict that is stopping the husband from leaving his wife is that he had always promised his wife he would never leave. This song demonstrates the importance of logos because the speaker is the one trying to demonstrate the best reasoning for leaving to his wife and his audience.

The husband demonstrates his reasoning by stating that the surrounding situations in their lives are changing as their sons have grown up, they have entered midlife, and the husband is now feeling as if he has lost the woman he feel in love with. The husband believes that his wife has been taken over by the difficulties in their life and their marriage. Those difficulties are based on her feelings of losing control of her life, and have turned her into an unhappy woman, who is angry all the time, and she is not the only one with problems surrounding her.

The speaker of the song is the husband, who is speaking to his wife in the song. This is where the pathos part of the lyrics comes in, as the speaker starts giving his reasoning of what she has done to make him leave her. In the song, the speaker says in the chorus of the song, “You ain't the only one who feels like this world left you far behind/ I don't know why you gotta be Angry All The Time”. Through these lyrics, he is explaining how she is not the only one losing control of their lives. Through his wife’s changes in her personality, he chooses his feelings over his job, as a husband, to stand by his wife, as he decides to leave her. Through the author’s lyrical demonstration of her change in personality, the listener is able to see that this divorce was uncontrollable.

The author of this song, Bruce Robinson, portrays a common message of a breakup in a clear way. In the lines, “I got to get away” and then again, “Twenty years have came and went since I walked out of your door”, it is known by the listener that the husband leaves his wife. Although the message is not an uplifting one, it’s a situation that a lot of Americans deal with and can relate to. It is a situation of when divorce occurs due to outside powers beyond the love bond.

Robinson uses a unique method of a timeline of the speaker’s life, to explain the opinion about divorce in the song. The author speaks of times from their current relationship, to their past, and then their future. Through Robinson’s method, it first allows the audience to know his reasoning for leaving in the lines, “I don’t know why you gotta be Angry All the Time”. Next, it speaks of the past when he says, “What I can't live with is memories of the way you used to be”. These lines tell us of how remembering the past, when she wasn’t angry, makes it more difficult for him to live in their current lifestyle. Finally, the author goes into their future, after they have gone their separate ways. In the lines about their future, it is discovered that the husband still has feelings for his wife but had to leave her to help himself become happier than their current lifestyle. It is found by the lines, “I never quite made it back to the one I was before”.

“Angry All the Time” is a song that many listeners can relate to because the author, Robinson, does an effective job of displaying his message about divorce. Other people, besides divorced couples, can also relate to this song over broken relationships because it is about the world dividing a couples bond; which can be current in any time of relationship. The people going through the heartbreak of divorce or broken relationships know that people tend to grow apart and divorce can be unavoidable. Robinson does an effective job of displaying his message about divorce being unavoidable at points in the song by having the lines, “The reasons that I can't stay don't have a thing to do with being in love”. He also does a great job of connecting to the listeners of the song by saying the lines, “I remember every time I said I'd never leave/ What I can't live with is memories of the way you used to be”. These two lines connect to listeners because no one ever hopes for divorce. There have always been promises made between couples, that end up splitting up, that stated about always staying together and being there for each other through the hardest parts in life. The main message of this song is that divorce can come because of outside factors. That it can become uncontrollable at times but it does not always have to be viewed as a bad thing if it is helping a person became a better person.