Things I'd Like to Say about "Things I'd Like to Say," by Jude Hopkins, November 6, 2025

Recently, I saw a post on social media that linked to an old song, "Things I'd Like to Say," by a group named New Colony Six. And by "old," I mean one that is 50-some years old, having charted on Billboard's Top 100 in 1969.

But sometimes those old songs convey wisdom in an indelible way.

"Things I'd Like to Say" was a break-up record—maybe that's not a true genre like pop or rock or country, but it is a recognizable one. Even break-up songs have sub-genres: "These Boots Were Made for Walkin' by Nancy Sinatra is a sassy, revenge tune; "Where Did Our Love Go" by The Supremes, a soulful pop tune asking the age-old question over an insistent beat (or backbeat); and "Yesterday" by The Beatles, a wistful ballad about lost love.

"Things I'd Like to Say" would slide into the last category, a dewy-eyed reflection on love gone wrong, sung plaintively by a guy who was filled with regret and resignation over losing his girl. Yet it seemed to evoke so much more in its short duration of 2 minutes and 19 seconds than a faded pop song from years ago should have.

The song begins with the singer addressing his lost love with a question: "Baby, is he looking after you / Is he showing you the same love, the warm love, just like we knew?" Nothing here to give the sonneteer side of Shakespeare any reason to be jealous. Instead, we get mostly platitudinous sentiments, indicating the singer's concern that his ex had chosen to move on with a guy whom he hopes is as tender-hearted and attentive as he had been in their relationship.

The next few lines indicate the singer isn't over the girl, leading us to believe he was the one who was summarily dumped: "Baby, Baby, it's you I'm thinking of / In the morning when I wake up / In the evening, it's you that I dream of." He's still a bit too obsessed, it seems, if he's thinking of her constantly while she has already moved on with someone new.

This same fixation on the singer's ex continues in the chorus when he turns from asking questions and expressing concerns to the imparting of actual lessons on love. "Sometimes love hurts and sometimes love's unkind," he sings, "and sometimes you might feel blue." He goes on to remind her that "if his [the new guy's] words are real," these feelings "will never never happen to you."

Wow. That was some miraculous love, one that ought never to have made her feel sad—never mind hurt or blue. The implication is, of course, that the singer loved her so much that he would never have done any of those things to make her feel anything other than cherished. Since he sets the bar so high, he's implying the new guy will disappoint her, if he hasn't already, reminding her at the same time what she's missing.

But something happened to break them up. Clearly, she didn't love him as much as he did her. Maybe she longed for more excitement, more of a challenge. Maybe it never was. Maybe the singer is singing about a fantasy girl, one he never possessed. Regardless, it's over. O-V-E-R.

All of this reflection is punctuated by heavy strings, rather an anomaly, one would think, in the Swingin' Sixties, an era known for such hard rock classics as The Doors' "Light My Fire" and Led Zepplin's "Whole Lotta Love." To the ears of people today, the strings are overdone, as are the lyrics. It's all too sweet and maudlin, sickeningly so. The singer sings too entreatingly and wistfully, his voice delivering the sentiments without an ounce of irony, another feature of the past's ephemera that's incomprehensible to today's youth.

"Baby, baby," he sings in a shortened verse, "there's things I'd like to say." One of those things was that with such a love as theirs, at least as he had envisioned it, they would get married someday. Those words repeated at the end are allowed to hang in the air, unresolved, musically or lyrically.

Instead, a piano coda, the best part of the song, comes in with the resolution: a few beautiful chords, some minor or diminished, to end it, along with all the wishin' and hopin' that had preceded it. Whatever "it" had been—or hadn't been—is irretrievable, the music says. Once the coda ends with a major chord, we are led to believe the singer is on the road to accepting things as they are. As he should.

This was a year in which another break-up song, "The Worst That Could Happen," by the Brooklyn Bridge (the group, not the suspension bridge in New York) was still on the charts when "Things I'd Like to Say" took over. In the former, the singer sings, non-ironically as well, about his girl who is getting married to someone else—the best thing for her, but the worst for him.

That song, although sung by Johnny Maestro, who could deliver more emotion than a roomful of roses, didn't affect me the same as "Things I'd Like to Say."

Perhaps it was inclusion of the coda, expressing musically what the singer failed to do lyrically.

Or maybe it was remembering how one rationalizes the promises and illusions of young love only to have those promises and illusions subsumed over time by "keen lessons that love deceives, / And wrings with wrong," as Thomas Hardy wrote so knowingly in his poem "Neutral Tones."

Once a lovely accent to a typical pop song from long ago now serves as a funeral dirge to what remains immoveable from the past: "Your face, and the God curst sun, and a tree, /And a pond edged with grayish leaves." It gave me pause.

The same is true of all love's lessons learned in the intervening years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZqwMt1kCDM&list=RDXZqwMt1kCDM&start_radio=1