From the recording "Somebody Like Me"
From "Action Pact"
Lyrics
Written close to my birthday in 1987, while I had pnuemonia. I wrote it with Patty Smyth in mind, and I actually had the chance in Germany in 1993 to hand it to her on CD. She was on the set of a TV show shot in Bremen where I lived. Not knowing that I was famous enough in Germany to have also done this show, she snubbed me and pretended not to know me. We had met back in 1979 when I was a "star" in NYC and experiencing an avalanche of press. She was a local young singer performing at "Kenny's Castaways" on Bleecker Street. She knew who I was then! I was there dining with Maggie Roche and Robert Fripp, who was in town producing The Roches, and she came over to our table.
While in "Scandal" years later, she had an affair with her bass player Ivan Elias who had been my bass player for many years. She broke up his marriage. Not to mention that "Goodbye to You" sounds an awful lot like "It's Important," Ivan played on both, and I had to live with people telling me that for years even though I recorded my song first.
Ms. Smyth totally embarrased me in front of an A&R guy from MCA records who had brought me to see her after I told him that I knew her. When I mentioned Ivan to her to try and jolt her memory, she only told me that he was not too bright, but good-looking.
MCA had expressed interest in signing me at the time, but when she dissed me and pretended not to know me at all, the A&R man stopped talking to me altogether. Either I embarrassed him, or he was scolded by her for bringing me along to dinner and the show, under the premise that we knew one another.
I later told this story to Ivan before he passed in 1995, and he just nodded his head because he thought she was a bitch, too, and it was nice for him to hear someone else say it out loud.