Paul doesn’t want to talk much about the road, because it brought him to your door. Why grumble—he got here, didn’t he? Aren’t you pleased to see him? Glad that’s behind us now. Aretha, however, is not so relieved to be here. She does not look on the bright side. She spent too long on that road; it took a lot out of her. As she sang a few years earlier in a song her sister wrote, “Ain’t No Way,” she paid too much for what she got. Aretha ends the song still out on the stoop—“don’t leave me standing here”—and you wonder, as you never do in Paul’s version, if she’s ever getting through the door.
