First Loves / Elisabeth

Robbin Ahrold, Billy Seidman

I was fourteen, too shy and baby way too tall

You were a French girl with a deep bikini tan

I played guitar, sang songs you loved; hey I knew them all

On that windswept beach you were my biggest fan

All that summer as the sun rose every day

We met each other in our sandy hideaway

You taught me French, you helped me learn the easy way

And we made love when there were no more words to say

Elisabeth, Elisabeth your smile has never faded

Elisabeth, Elisabeth you live in magic we created

We drifted away like the leaves do in October

First loves, first loves are never over

First loves, first loves they’re never over

And when the night came down so dark we could not see

We left our clothes up on the beach and then we ran

There in that midnight surf your skin so close to me

We’d warm each other by a beach fire holding hands

Our lives moved on we left those moments far behind

Still hearts remember as so many years roll by

Does our first love still own a corner of your mind?

And make you wonder what could have been for you and I?

Elisabeth, Elisabeth your smile has never faded

Elisabeth, Elisabeth you live in magic we created

We drifted away like the leaves do in October

First loves, first loves are never over

About the song

We never forget the girl or boy who became our adolescent first “love”, no matter how callow we may have been at the time. An American teen-ager vacationing in France falls hard for a French girl, and time seems to freeze for endless days under the sun, with no thought of the future beyond the summer escape. Life intervenes. Yet a lifetime later, those charmed days are still implausibly vivid in memory, asking the eternal “what if” in retrospect.

Credits

Music and Lyrics by Robbin Ahrold and Billy Seidman. Instrumental track by Billy Seidman recorded at SongArts Studios, New York City, March 2018, and vocals by Robbin Ahrold, recorded at Recording Arts Studios, Arlington, Virginia, 2019.

DOWLOAD LYRICS