How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man? How many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry, and how many deaths will it take until he knows, that too many people have died?
If you took all the girls I knew when I was single, brought them all together for one night
I know they'd never match my sweet imagination, and everything looks worse in black and white
So it's a good thing we had Kodachrome film, color slide film to capture the colors of the time period. I always saw the black on white lyrics as a play on words for seeing something in writing, like a legal notice or the actually losses or gains of a company
In this case, the actual number of women he dated being likely less than he imagined.
The song takes us to the Pacific Northwest, from Redwood, California down to Hollywood, it's a little bit of a drive, but on the scale of the entire U.S., or in the context of the entire world not all that far apart physically, but could sum up some people's perception of a totally different way of life in the two places. Certainly, a completely different landscape.
