Lucia Švecová

Relationship Between Conceptions of Voice and the ‘Lyric I’ in Amy Winehouse’s

Cover Version of Valerie by The Zutons.

1
Contents

1. The ‘Lyric I’ and voice in a popular song 25

2. Valerie and transformation of the ‘lyric I’ through Winehouse’s voice 29

3. Conclusion 34

Bibliography 37

Appendix A 39

2
1. The ‘Lyric I’ and voice in a popular song

Although lyric in the modern sense of Western poetics is a term applied to almost all poetry,

its origins lie inherently in music – the term comes from Greek where it signified the musical

instrument that accompanied songs of poets, and it was only later in the Alexandrian

period, when the texts of the songs were collected in the library and grouped together as

lyrics, that the word became associated with poetry.1 Subsequently, in the Romantic period

the lyric was elevated as one of the three fundamental genres, whereby the lyric was, in

Jonathan Culler’s words, distinguished as ‘an imitation of the experience of the subject’.2

The subjective aspect of experience brings Culler to a discussion of ambiguity of the ‘lyric I’

in the first-person lyric address. He returns to the Greek origin of the word, where the lyric

would always be heard in a performance, thereby being perceived by the listener as voiced

by the performer, as representing someone real speaking to the listener in the performer’s

voice. Hence, rather than representing a mere linguistic function, the ‘lyric I’ compels the

listener to ask who the creator of these thoughts was and highlights the meaning of the text

as linked to the voice of the performer – does the ‘I’ in the lyric signify the poet, or the

performer, or an abstract ‘persona’? In addition to that, Culler points out that the ‘absent

“you”’ in a lyric address foregrounds the complexity of the lyrical subject’.3 Does the

performer address the reader, or their lover, or both?

Consequently, the perception of lyrics in a popular song is complicated by the same complex

relationship between the author, the performer, and the meaning of the words. Simon Frith

1
V. Jackson, ‘Lyric’, in R. Greene, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2017.
2
J. Culler, The Theory of the Lyric, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015, p. 1.
3
Ibid. p. 34.

3
describes this relationship as a process in which the author ‘sets up the situation’ in the lyric

and puts ‘the words in the “I’s” mouth’, while the singer’s voice has to relate to ‘the voices

communicated through the lyric and the author’s voice behind the origin of the lyric’.4

Furthermore, Frith argues that there are competing meanings in the words and music, a

dichotomy conveyed through ‘the relationship between the voice as a carrier of sounds, the

singing voice, making “gestures”, and the voice as a carrier of words, the speaking voice,

making “utterances”’.5

The singer-songwriter phenomenon, widespread in popular music, adds another variable

into the equation of the ‘lyric I’s’ meaning through the identification of the author with the

performer. On the one hand, the meaning should be less complex, since the author’s

personal presence in performance seems to clarify in whose voice the first-person pronoun

speaks. On the other hand, however, Roland Barthes’ idea of ‘death of the author’, as a

now-standard way of perceiving the authorial role, highlights the fact that the meaning of

the words depends on who is listening to the lyric; whereas, once the lyric is

read/sung/performed, the author and their relation to the meaning become irrelevant.6

Apart from that, it can be argued that, when the lyric is sung, the importance of the words is

only secondary too. Lawrence Kramer, building on Barthes’ argument in his 1972 article ‘The

Grain of the Voice’, points out that the materiality of forming words in the mouth is what

we perceive first, before the meaning of the words.7 He goes on to argue that the singing

voice not only enunciates words but also ‘does the opposite’ – ‘words melt in the mouth of

4
S. Frith, Performing Rites, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 184.
5
Ibid. pp. 186-187.
6
R. Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, in R. Barthes (transl. S. Heath), Image-Text-Music, London: Fontana
Paperbacks, 1984 (1977), p. 142.
7
L. Kramer, ‘Song as Paraphrase’, New Literary History Vol. 46 No. 4, Baltimore, Autumn 2015, pp. 573-594.

4
the singing voice’ because in singing, ‘speech sounds undergo a creative deformation’.8

Carolyn Abbate similarly argues for the primary importance of the voice over the words,

using the example of a listener who is too far from the stage to hear the words of the aria,

yet they perceive the plot of the opera through the voice.9 Hence, although words are an

inherent part of understanding a song, such ‘undoing of speech’ and focus on the voice itself

means that their meaning may be much more fluid.

Brandon LaBelle then points out that we cannot perceive the voice without the physicality

of the vocal organ – the mouth is ‘a fleshy, wet lining around each syllable, as well as a

texturing orifice that marks the voice with specificity, not only in terms of accent or dialect,

but also by the depth of expression so central to the body’.10 This aspect becomes more

complex when it is applied to a recorded voice – Abbate coins the recorded voice as

‘disembodied’, signifying that we hear the voice but we do not see the body, and therefore

the ‘sound of the singing voice becomes, as it were, a "voice-object" and the sole centre for

the listener's attention’.11 Nevertheless, in this recorded ‘voice-object’ the bodily nature of

the voice is, in fact, even more emphasised through the microphone, which, in Steven

Connor’s words, ‘selectively amplifies the noises of the mouth’s own slidings, impacts,

poppings, and palpitations’.12 Therefore, the listener can feel that they get to know the body

of the singer through the physicality of their voice.

8
L. Kramer, ‘Song as Paraphrase’.
9
C. Abbate, Unsung Voices, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 6.
10
B. LaBelle, Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary, New York:
Bloomsbury, 2014. p. 1.
11
C. Abbate, Unsung Voices, p. 10.
12
S. Connor, ‘Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing’, in V. Erlmann, Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening
and Modernity, Oxford: Berg, 2004, pp. 153-172.

5
The intimacy of getting to know the body is in the case of a singer-songwriter, singing about

what seems to be their personal experience, enriched by apparent familiarity with the

singer’s subjectivity. Allan Moore argues that we tend to place more value on the ‘first

person authenticity’ of singers singing their own songs due to the presumed ‘unmediated

expression of emotion’.13 Nicola Dibben also talks about the ‘intimate relationship with the

singer’, mediated through this expression – reviews and fan forums show that listeners feel

as if they were ‘given access to the singer’s psyche or soul’.14 Nevertheless, the perception

of the voice as personally expressive leads the listener to associate the meaning of the ‘lyric

I’ with the singer, whether or not they are the author – Frith associates the ‘pop voice’ with

a physical singing style, in which we hear singers as particularly ‘personally expressive (even,

perhaps especially, when they are not singing “their own” songs)’.15 Thus, the physicality of

the voice can be used to re-claim ownership of a song.

Focusing on the ‘pop’ singing style, Moore creates an analytical framework, which highlights

the ways in which a singer may consciously change the meaning of the words.16 Firstly, he

addresses ‘register’, distinguishing between low register, which carries certain ‘gravity’ and

‘sexiness’; normal ‘comfortable’ register; and high register, ‘which may be read as virtuosic,

as embodying physical effort, as lighthearted’.17 The next aspect he talks about is the ‘cavity

of the body’, where he distinguishes between singing styles as ‘nasal’, ‘head singing’, ‘throat

singing’, and ‘chest singing’ – ‘a nasal tone’ might appear ‘distanced’ or ‘stylized’, whilst

13
A. Moore, ‘Authenticity as Authentication’, Popular Music Vol. 21 No. 2, May 2002, pp. 209-223.
14
N. Dibben, ‘The Intimate Singing Voice: Auditory Spatial Perception and Emotion in Pop Recordings’, in D.
Zakharine and N. Meise, Electrified Voices: Medial, Socio-Historical and Cultural Aspects of Voice Transfer,
Göttingen: V&R Uni Press, 2013, p. 109.
15
S. Frith, Performing Rites, p. 186.
16
A. Moore, Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, pp.
102-103.
17
Ibid. pp. 102-103.

6
singing from the throat appears ‘normal’, singing from the head may appear weak, and

singing from the chest usually sounds powerful.18 Alongside the voice types, Moore also lists

two aspects related to interpretation of the words – the singer’s ‘heard attitude to rhythm’

and ‘heard attitude to pitch’.19 If the singer places words not-exactly on the beat, he or she

creates a particular interpretation of the words, and this interpretation is enhanced by

alterations of pitch, such as singing slightly flat or sharp in various moments, because the

singer’s (non)conforming to the pitch expresses whether their attitude to the meaning of

the words is unequivocal or whether they are trying to subvert it. This essay focuses on the

example of Amy Winehouse’s cover (2007) of The Zutons’ Valerie (2006), using Moore’s

framework as well as the preceding discussion of the relationship between the voice and

the ‘lyric I’ to show how Winehouse transformed the meaning of the ‘lyric I’ in this song.

2. Valerie and transformation of the ‘lyric I’ through Winehouse’s voice

There are many people who are still amazed when they find out that the collaboration of

Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson, Valerie (2007), is not actually Winehouse’s own song.20

How is it possible that so many people do not know the author (and the original performers)

of this popular song? Cover songs present us with complex issues of identity, authorship,

and the meaning of the text. Winehouse’s cover provides us with an insight into these issues

as a cover whose originality proved to be more successful in its own right than the original.

18
A. Moore, Song Means, pp. 102-103.
19
Ibid.
20
M. Osborn, ‘Talking Shop: The Zutons’, BBC News, 8 August 2008,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/mobile/entertainment/7547156.stm, (accessed 10 April 2020).

7
In particular, Winehouse’s Valerie presents the listener with a transformation of the ‘lyric I’,

complicated by the fact that it is a cover of a song by a singer-songwriter.

The original Valerie was written by David McCabe, the lead singer of English indie-rock band,

The Zutons, and released on their second album, Tired of Hanging Around, in April 2006. The

song became popular in the UK in summer 2006, subsequently achieving the ninth position

in that year’s Official Charts Company’s ‘UK Singles Chart’.21 The release of this song was

shortly thereafter followed by a cover version by Amy Winehouse. In fact, not just one but

two – a slow cover version was released as a bonus track on her album Back to Black in

October 2006, and a year later a more upbeat cover version was released on Mark Ronson’s

album Version. I will focus on the latter, most well-known cover of Valerie.

Ronson invited Winehouse, who claimed to have not listened to ‘anything written after

1967’, to work on his project of ‘soul covers of guitar records’, and she suggested doing

Valerie, which she had already had experience with.22 Although Ronson initially could not

imagine her voice in that song, at the end of October 2007 their version of Valerie became

second in the same chart in which The Zutons’ Valerie had been ninth in 2006, thereby

eclipsing the popularity of the original.23 On the one hand, George Plasketes points out that

cover versions can work as an affirmation of the status of the original song – if a song is

good and popular, it will almost inevitably get covered.24 This was not the case with Valerie,

however – although The Zutons’ bassist Russell Pritchard said that The Zutons did not mind

21
Official Charts Company, ‘Official Singles Chart Top 100’, Official Charts, 2006,
https://www.officialcharts.com/charts/singles-chart/20060625/7501/, (accessed 18 November 2019).
22
Song Facts, ‘Valerie’, Song Facts, https://www.songfacts.com/facts/mark-ronson/valerie, (accessed 8
September 2019).
23
Official Charts Company, ‘Amy Winehouse’, Official Charts, https://www.officialcharts.com/artist/812/amy-
winehouse/, (accessed 5 February 2020).
24
G. Plasketes, ‘Introduction: Like a Version’, in G. Plasketes, Play It Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music,
Burlington: Ashgate, 2012, p. 1.

8
Ronson and Winehouse working on this cover, since ‘nobody had covered one of [their]

songs before’, the public simply forgot about the original of the song by The Zutons, who,

after being dropped by their record label, quietly disbanded in 2009.25

The lyrics of Valerie represent a monologue, but this monologue is an address to a person

who is named as Valerie in the lyrics [see the lyrics in Appendix A]. Thus, written and sung

by McCabe, we might perceive the lyrics as describing a relationship between Dave and

Valerie, a man and a woman, revealing Valerie’s story through questions about her life. The

first stanza can be regarded as a short opening address, characteristic of lyrical poetry,

which does not specify who the person being addressed is. The second stanza suggests that

the relationship is romantic by referring to how much Dave misses her, and he confirms that

impression in the line ‘Why won’t you come on over, Valerie?’. At the end of this stanza, the

‘absent you’ is identified as Valerie, but the delay in identifying the ‘you’ undermines the

unequivocality of this identification.

After the song’s release, McCabe revealed that the song was written for a real Valerie, a

friend that he met in America, thus representing his own personal story and reinforcing his

identity as the ‘lyric I’.26 The perception of the ‘lyric I’ is furthered by McCabe’s voice – when

assessed through Moore’s analysis of the pop singing style, we can say that McCabe, with

his clear enunciation of words, placed mostly exactly on the beat and in the right pitch,

emphasises the meaning of the lyrics as true, and his high tenor voice, conveying the

25
Song Facts, ‘Valerie’.; Wikiwand, ‘The Zutons’, Wikipedia, https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Zutons,
(accessed 10 April 2020).
26
R. Webb, ‘Story of the Song: Valerie, The Zutons, 2006’, The Independent, 7 January 2011,
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/story-of-the-song-valerie-the-zutons-
2006-2178613.html, (accessed 25 September 2019).

9
physical effort of singing in a high register, may represent the ‘effort’ that describes his life

without Valerie.

If the original version of Valerie was a depiction of a romantic relationship between a real

Dave and a real Valerie, what happens to its meaning when it is sung by Winehouse? The

narrator has changed its gendered body, thereby creating a new set of meanings for the

lyric. Does Winehouse as the narrator portray a lesbian relationship or is it a detached

analogy in which Winehouse might identify with Valerie? Or does she want us to identify

with Valerie? On the other hand, in the postmodern view of Barthes’ ‘death of the author’,

the meaning of the text does not depend on the existence of the author’s friend in real life –

the meaning of the ‘you’ in the lyrics is born only when the song starts and dies when it

finishes.27 Since understanding meaning is always an interpretative act, the meaning of

Winehouse’s Valerie ultimately depends on us as individual listeners. Nevertheless, because

McCabe made us aware of the original intention to depict his personal experience,

Winehouse’s cover undeniably creates more complex layers of meaning than were present

in the original.

To analyse how Winehouse’s voice itself further complicates the meaning, we will use

Moore’s analysis of the way in which the singing style affects our understanding of a

performed song.28 This song is mostly in Winehouse’s ‘normal’ range, which is naturally in

slightly lower register, thereby conveying gravity. This is contrasted with McCabe’s tenor

‘head’ voice, which, according to Moore, may be perceived as ‘weak’ or ‘careless’, while

Winehouse’s singing from the chest ‘connotes greater care, presence, power’.29 I therefore

27
R. Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, p. 142.
28
A. Moore, Song Means, pp. 102-103.
29
Ibid.

10
suggest that this performance makes us believe that the song is truly Winehouse’s. In

places, however, she has to switch to a higher register and occasionally she chooses to use a

more nasal tone, through which she highlights the stylized nature of the cover.

In terms of her interpretation of the words, the characteristic feature of the song is

Winehouse’s virtuosic ‘playing around’ with the name ‘Valerie’. This further complicates the

meaning of the lyrical address, since Winehouse’s ‘heard attitude to rhythm and pitch’ on

this word might seem to undermine the identity of Valerie as a real distinct person and

object of the meaning of the lyric. On the other hand, though, the listener might not think

about the meaning of the text at all, simply because the sound of Winehouse’s voice itself

attracts the attention and foregrounds her strength of presence instead of the ambiguity of

the lyrics’ meaning.

If authenticity is gained through the listener’s perceived relationship with the singer, which

is created through listening to the voice rather than through believing that the singer really

sings about their personal experience, Winehouse could have used the listener’s perception

of her voice to create a similar impression of ‘authenticity’, despite not having written the

song herself. Nonetheless, the video clip of Ronson and Winehouse’s version further

complicates the ‘lyric I’ by the multiplicity of performers – the clip portrays a staged lip-

syncing performance of Winehouse’s Valerie in which five different women impersonate

Winehouse, copying the style of her clothes and her make-up, as well as her hairstyle. Thus,

our perception of whose identity is actually being portrayed in the song is constantly being

obscured.

Overall, Winehouse transforms the ‘lyric I’ of Valerie mainly by the fact that the role of the

narrator has passed down from the author to her as the performer. Barthes argues that in

11
narration of a fact, or of a personal experience such as McCabe’s relationship with Valerie,

the fact has no other function than ‘the very practice of the symbol itself’ and the voice of

the author ‘loses its origin’.30 In addition, Winehouse’s cover creates multiple layers of the

‘I’s’ meaning, namely through the video clip, where Winehouse is present only in voice but

not in body. The clip presents McCabe’s personal experiences, perceived through

Winehouse’s personal expression, yet impersonated by other performers. Who is the ‘I’

here and whom do they address? Whilst that is down to every listener to decide for

themselves, this video clip emphasises the ability to relate to one another – just as

Winehouse relates to McCabe’s story, and perhaps to Valerie too, the lip-syncing

performers relate to Winehouse’s voice as well as to her body. LaBelle explains this through

sound’s ability to ‘relate to another body’ – sound is both a ‘continual encounter with the

other’ as well as a ‘medium for intimate sharing’, and since sound is both produced and

perceived through the body, we are able to relate to the body of the sound source.31

5. Conclusion

Another important new meaning of Valerie resides in the transformation of the

instrumental accompaniment – Winehouse and Ronson changed an indie rock song into a

song in the ‘50s and ‘60s soul style. Plasketes argues that this kind of crossing of musical

styles can be seen ‘as a postmodern manifestation of rampant re-contextualization in

music’.32 It is an appropriation or evocation of the socio-cultural contexts, in which styles

originated, placing them in the current socio-cultural context, with the intention of a

30
R. Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, p. 142.
31
B. LaBelle, Lexicon of the Mouth, p. x.
32
G. Plasketes, ‘Introduction: Like A Version’, p. 2.

12
postmodern reflection on both. According to Bronwyn Polaschek, the context that

Winehouse particularly wanted to evoke through both her image and music was the 1960s

working-class life, and particularly working-class girl groups, such as The Shangri-Las, The

Shirelles, or The Ronettes – she argues that the ‘nostalgic sensibility’ for these groups was

an aspect of Winehouse’s musical references that was ‘central to her self-constructed

celebrity persona’.33

This construction of identity points out another layer of meaning that Winehouse adds to

Valerie – a social meaning, a postmodern reflection on the social context. The social

meaning is also emphasised by the reflection of the song’s third stanza on the social

problems in Valerie’s life, such as imprisonment and debt. In addition, Winehouse’s cover,

returning to the style of the ‘60s, also offers a reflection on the notion of the singer-

songwriter, which, according to David Shumway, emerged in the late 1960s.34 She

associates the song with the style associated with the first famous popular-music singers-

songwriters, even though, in this song, she is not a singer-songwriter herself. Consequently,

Winehouse’s style, with its complexity of meanings, appears to be meta-reflective.

The authenticity of Winehouse’s version therefore primarily resides in the transformation of

the meaning. As Moore, points out, authenticity is a ‘loaded’ term, although it is

nevertheless a term that is frequently used in evaluation of popular music.35 It mainly

signifies an evaluation of originality, which is usually defined as being ‘different from

anything that has been offered before’.36 Yet, just as meaning depends on our

33
B. Polaschek, ‘The dissonant personas of a female celebrity: Amy and the public self of Amy Winehouse’,
Celebrity Studies Vol. 9 No. 1, 2018, pp. 17-33.
34
D. Shumway, ‘The Emergence of the Singer-Songwriter’, in K. Williams and A. Justin, The Cambridge
Companion to the Singer-Songwriter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 11-20.
35
A. Moore, Song Means, p. 259.
36
Ibid.

13
interpretation, so authenticity, according to Moore, is ‘ascribed, not inscribed’.37 Whether

we see a performance as authentic ‘depends on who “we” are’, and therefore the

construction of ‘authenticity’ lies in ‘the act of listening’.38 Hence, if we perceive both the

musical style and transformed meaning as sufficiently ‘new’ in comparison to the original

song, the perception of authenticity will contribute to the cover’s popularity, which

sometimes may eclipse the popularity of the original. Winehouse has succeeded at

transforming the meaning of Valerie through her voice, her musical identity, and through

altering the relationship of the voices of the author, performer, and protagonists. Thanks to

such a complete transformation, we perceive Winehouse’s Valerie as authentic because she

has truly made the song ‘her own’.

37
A. Moore, ‘Authenticity and Authentication’, pp. 209-223.
38
Ibid.

14
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Connor, S. ‘Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing’, in Erlmann, V. (ed.) Hearing Cultures: Essays
on Sound, Listening and Modernity, Oxford: Berg, 2004.

Culler, J. The Theory of the Lyric, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Cusic, D. ‘In Defense of Cover Songs: Commerce and Credibility’, in Plasketes, G. (ed.) Play It
Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music, Burlington: Ashgate, 2010.

Dibben, N. ‘The Intimate Singing Voice: Auditory Spatial Perception and Emotion in Pop
Recordings’, in Zakharine, D. and Meise, N. (eds.), Electrified Voices: Medial, Socio-Historical
and Cultural Aspects of Voice Transfer, Göttingen: V&R Uni Press, 2013.

Frith, S. Performing Rites, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Jackson, V. ‘Lyric’, in Greene, R. (ed.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Kramer, L. ‘Song as Paraphrase’, New Literary History Vol. 46 No. 4, Baltimore, Autumn
2015, pp. 573-594.

LaBelle, B. Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary, New
York: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Miller, R. ‘Artist Intentions: A Case for Quality Covers’, in Plasketes, G. (ed.), Play It Again:
Cover Songs in Popular Music, Burlington: Ashgate, 2010.

Moore, A. F. ‘Authenticity and Authentication’, Popular Music Vol. 21 No. 2, 2002, pp. 209-
223.

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Ashgate, 2012.

Official Charts Company, ‘Amy Winehouse’, Official Charts,

https://www.officialcharts.com/artist/812/amy-winehouse/, (accessed 5 February 2020).

Official Charts Company, ‘Official Singles Chart Top 100’, Official Charts, 2006,
https://www.officialcharts.com/charts/singles-chart/20060625/7501/, (accessed 18
November 2019).

Osborn, M. ‘Talking Shop: The Zutons’, BBC News, 8 August 2008,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/mobile/entertainment/7547156.stm, (accessed 10 April 2020).

15
Plasketes, G. ‘Introduction: Like a Version’, in Plasketes, G. (ed.), Play It Again: Cover Songs
in Popular Music, Burlington: Ashgate, 2010.

Polaschek, B. ‘The dissonant personas of a female celebrity: Amy and the public self of Amy
Winehouse’, Celebrity Studies Vol. 9 No. 1, 2018, pp. 17-33.

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The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter, Cambridge: Cambridge University
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(accessed 8 September 2019).

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(ed.), Play It Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music, Burlington: Ashgate, 2010.

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https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/story-of-the-song-
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16
Apendix A – The Zutons, Valerie
Well sometimes I go out by myself
And I look across the water.
And I think of all the things,
What you're doing,
And through my head I make a picture.
'Cause since I've come on home
Well my body's been a mess
And I miss your ginger hair
And the way you like to dress.
Won't you come on over?
Stop making a fool out of me
Why won't you come on over,
Valerie, Valerie.
Did you have to go to jail,
Put your house on up for sale?
Did you get a good lawyer?
I hope you didn't catch a tan,
I hope you find the right man
Who'll fix it for you.
Are you shopping anywhere,
Changed the colour of your hair,
Are you busy?
And did you have to pay the fine,
You were dodging all the time are you still
dizzy?
17
'Cause since I've come on home
Well my body's been a mess
And I miss your ginger hair
And the way you like to dress.
Won't you come on over?
Stop making a fool out of me
Why won’t you come on over,
Valerie, Valerie, Valerie, Valerie.
Well sometimes I go out by myself
And I look across the water.
And I think of all the things,
What you're doing,
And in my head I make a picture.
'Cause since I've come on home
Well my body's been a mess
And I miss your ginger hair
And the way you like to dress.
Won't you come on over?
Stop making a fool out of me
Why won't you come on over.
Valerie, Valerie
Valerie, Valerie, Valerie.