What I Learned Too Late and the Two Songs That Explained It

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Song Lyric Sunday – Nina Simone, “The Other Woman”

My wife knew more about music than any woman I’ve ever met outside my mother. She couldn’t name artists, albums, or genres. None of that mattered. She just knew what was good. And the shit was spooky.

I learned this slowly, almost reluctantly, because I kept trying to talk to her about favorite artists. She never played that game. Her ear didn’t care about categories. Her heart didn’t negotiate with labels.

The first time she ever caught me off guard was the day I walked in and heard “Changes” by Black Sabbath drifting through the house.
Sabbath.
Black Sabbath.

Not a riff, not a hit — the one track that sounded like someone bottled regret.

It wasn’t that she was listening to Sabbath. It was that she somehow found the exact track I didn’t know I needed. And she did it without ever talking about music the way I did.

That quiet instinct — that sixth sense she carried — is what led her to two Nina Simone songs she treated like confessions. When she listened to Nina, the door stayed closed, the lamp stayed low, and you stayed out unless you were ready to walk into something fragile.

The smoke curled up from the cigarette balanced between her fingers, her hand resting beside a freshly cleaned ashtray. Hazelnut coffee filled the room, and Albert King was somewhere in the background complaining about the rain. I kissed her out of habit and apology — I stank to high heaven after a long day.

While I cleaned up, the music drifted from one blues track to another. I thought about grabbing a nap before the girls came home, when a voice cut through everything — soft, measured, heavy.

…wait. Is that Nina?

Next thing I knew, I was back at the table with a fresh cup of coffee. She didn’t look up, just nodded.

“I figured you’d get a nap before the girls got home,” she said.

I smiled into my cup.
This is why I married her — she got me.
She married me because I could reach the top shelf.
Balance in all things.

She slid the CD case to me and tapped a single track:

“The Other Woman.”

I replayed it a few times — autopsy mode — until she reached over and rested her hand on mine.

“Let it play, baby,” she said softly.

So I did.

“The Other Woman” isn’t loud or dramatic. It’s a truth-teller — the kind of song that doesn’t raise its voice because it doesn’t have to. Nina sings it low and steady, like someone who’s already made peace with the ache she’s naming. The piano stays half-lit, the bass moves like it’s carrying news no one wants to hear, and nothing in the arrangement tries to comfort you.

That’s what hooked my wife.
Not the lyrics.
Not the storyline.
The tone.

The way Nina delivered loneliness without apology.
The way she stood inside the ache without flinching.

My wife knew that tone.
She knew what it felt like to love a man who was half hers and half claimed by something bigger and colder than home.
“The Other Woman” wasn’t a song about cheating to her; it was the shape of a loneliness she never put into words — but Nina named it clean.

Back then, I thought it was a strange song for her to be listening to. I wasn’t stepping out. I felt the loneliness in Nina’s voice, but I didn’t understand the source. Maybe I wasn’t meant to — not then.

Years later, when she got sick — the kind of sick that turns a hospital room into a country of its own — I sat beside her bed with Nina in my headphones while I tried to write. And that’s when it hit me.

My wife knew what it felt like to be the other woman.

Not because of infidelity.
Not because of anything I did wrong.
But because of devotion and duty — the two forces that built our life and carved holes in it at the same time.

She loved a man claimed by an oath he made before he ever met her.
A man whose phone could ring at 2:17 a.m.
A man who packed on short notice and left with even less.

We preached “Family First.”
Said it often.
Said it like it was gospel.

But the truth — the one Nina kept whispering — was “Mission First.”

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If “The Other Woman” named the loneliness, then “Tell Me More and Then Some” named the hunger beneath it.

Not desire — presence.
Not passion — time.
Nina sings that second track like a woman reaching out in the dark, asking for just a little more of a man she barely gets to keep.

For a military spouse, that’s the whole gospel:
the hours rationed out,
the moments cut short,
the days borrowed by orders.

You love the man, but the world keeps the schedule.

My wife never said she needed more of me — she never would have — but Nina said it for her.
Together, those two songs held the architecture of her heart:
the ache of being second and the quiet hope that maybe she could still have a little more time before the world claimed me again.

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They lived on the same compilation she brought home when the girls were little — After Hours, still my favorite Nina collection. Maybe because it brought her voice into our home. Or maybe because it brought her truth into mine.

Those two tracks weren’t random choices.

They were the language she used to hold the parts of our life that the military kept taking.
The ache she carried quietly.
The hunger she never burdened me with.

Even now, as I write this, another Nina track slips in — “Ain’t No Use.” I didn’t cue it. Didn’t expect it. But there it is, like it wandered in to confirm every word on this page.

Nina always did that in our home — show up when truth was ready.

“The Other Woman” is my official Song Lyric Sunday entry because it appears on the 1969 compilation The Best of Nina Simone, one of her earliest and most enduring collections.

But really?
I’m choosing it because my wife understood this song long before I did. She lived the ache of being second to a calling she never chose, with a grace I still don’t know how to name.

Some songs don’t remind you of a person —
they finish the conversations you didn’t know you were having while they were still here.

This is one of those songs.

Let it play, baby.

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Author’s Note:
This piece isn’t about infidelity. It’s about the complicated places where love and duty overlap, and the quiet truths that grow in the spaces no one talks about. My wife and I were both Nina Simone fans, though she understood Nina in ways I didn’t grasp until much later. The songs mentioned here — “The Other Woman” and “Tell Me More and Then Some” — were part of her private rituals, the moments she used to hold what our life couldn’t always name. This essay is my way of honoring the weight she carried with grace. If any part of it resonates with you, let it. That’s Nina’s doing, not mine.

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