“What do the lyrics of California Rain by Betty Who mean?” I ask AI. As if I’m expecting a computer algorithm and recycled commentary to sooth my own aches of humanness and loneliness.
The Gemini overview says, "Acceptance… about an inconsistent, fleeting, and bittersweet relationship that only appears when times are hard or lonely.”
The void has not been fulfilled. My quest for understanding continues. I search another, on Claude. Here we have, “California is famous for sunshine and dry weather, so rain there is a rare thing that people hope for. The comparison seems to be about someone who promised or seemed to offer something and then wasn’t there when it counted. The disappointment feels gentler than betrayal, more like waiting for something that never arrives. Placed at the end of an album full of crushes, heartbreak, and nostalgia, it works as a final reckoning with a love that didn’t deliver.”
Why then, after all this rehashing, is there this imagery that this song invokes in me? And maybe looking for someone or something to make meaning will never satisfy me like the rains of my own sadness.
When Betty sings:
“I love it when you are lonely,
That’s when we feel the same.”
I can think of nothing sadder. I listen as someone who has never seen a California rain. I’ve only seen Connecticut or Louisiana rain. I imagine a rainfall just gentle and slow as a mist. Wisps of air that move the droplets in swirls. I am standing, exposed to the elements. I think about looking forlorn into that same dreary sky and, in a moment, feeling like this big atmosphere is the only thing that could understand me. I think of the times that I thought a relationship was working, when it wasn’t. Or this quiet, deep sensation that the only times I could be wanted by a person was when they had no one else, because that soothed or mirrored the loneliness I felt in myself.
How does a computer relate to that? To the comfort of someone else’s faults? And how is a love that has ended and lingers, while comforting, any different from a haunting?
