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That One Last Rose

from Last Rose by Ted Silar

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about

I wrote “That One Last Rose,” before “Why Do We Have to Dream?”, when I was living in a real, bona fide artist’s attic garret, the kind where you hit your head on the ceiling when you come up the stairs—only it was in Emmaus, PA, instead of Paris.

I’d sit in my slowly crumpling old armchair, looking out over the borough rooftops at the South Mountain, Rod and Gun Club blasting away up there, afternoon sunlight streaming in the many windows, and strum away at my boomy old Fender Montara with the fingernail gouges that made it like playing razor wire. I wrote “That One Last Rose” as a straight country song, only noticing that it lent itself to a honky-tonk treatment when I started recording.

This time I really worked hard on the melody. I must have made and rejected each phrase a hundred times until I found one I liked. I think this trial-and-error method is why each phrase in the verse has a different length, as well as a different melody.

I was also determined to write a song with a structure where the last two lines of the bridge are the same as the last two lines of the verse. Like “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” amongst a thousand other Hank Williams songs.

I don’t know where the idea came from, although wild unbridled squandering is a practice I am not unfamiliar with. I also thought the rose metaphor itself kind of strange, but to my surprise chucking roses in the trash seems to mean something to people, who knows why.

lyrics

One by one we've lost the roses
of days of yore.
Where is the solid ground?
What are you hanging round here for?

One by one we've lost the roses.
There ain't no more.
Throw out that one last rose
and gently close the door

One by one we've lost the roses.
We didn't care.
We made a pretty pair.
We scattered roses everywhere.

One by one we've lost the roses.
Who counts the cost?
Throw out that one last rose,
it goes with those we've lost.

“There goes another one,”
we'd laugh and have our fun.
We didn't know our race was run.
We didn't know our time was done.

One by one we've lost the roses.
They go so fast.
Throw out that one last rose
and with it goes the past.

SOLO

“There goes another one,”
we'd laugh and have our fun.
We didn't know our race was run.
We didn't know our time was done.

One by one we've lost the roses.
There ain’t no more.
Throw out that one last rose
and gently close the door.

credits

from Last Rose, released December 30, 2022
Written and performed by Ted Silar
Byron Berline - fiddle
Dan Dugmore - pedal steel

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about

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Ted Silar Allentown, Pennsylvania

I’ve played rock ‘n’ roll at high school hops, blues in Texas roadhouses, country in rural fire halls, jazz piano in smoky cocktail lounges, sung Bach in Saxony and twelve-tone music a cappella. In my time, I’ve written country, rock ‘n’ roll, classical, jazz, rhythm and blues. I write what I like. I don’t pay attention to trends. ... more

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