The song “Making Excuses” is a poignant reflection on the human tendency to justify our shortcomings and failures in love.
There are songs that simply pass through the air, and then there are songs that settle deep in your soul, becoming a part of the landscape of your memories. Marty Robbins had a gift for crafting the latter, and his 1964 tune “Making Excuses” is a perfect example. Part of the album R.F.D., which peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard country album chart and stayed on the chart for a remarkable 28 weeks, the song itself wasn’t a standalone chartbuster. Instead, it was a quiet gem on an album that, to many, represented the very best of Robbins’s work from that era. The album’s very name, R.F.D., which stands for Rural Free Delivery, evokes a simpler time, a bygone era of rural America where the mailman was a familiar figure and life moved at a different pace. It’s fitting, then, that this album holds a song so deeply rooted in the universal, timeless experience of regret.
The genius of “Making Excuses” isn’t in a grand, sweeping narrative like his legendary ballad “El Paso”. There are no gunfights or dramatic escapes. The story here is far more intimate, far more common, and for that reason, perhaps even more heartbreaking. It’s the story of a man who has lost his love, not to some rival or a sudden tragedy, but to his own emotional negligence. He’s at a crossroads, staring at a picture of the woman he once had, and the weight of his loneliness is finally setting in. The song’s meaning is laid bare in its title—it’s about the lies we tell ourselves to soften the blow of our own failures. The lyrics, penned by Phoebe and Bob Binkley, are a masterclass in understated pathos. He sings of how he “lied a little, and laughed a lot” and “played a little too hard,” but always with the excuse that “a restless man has got to roam.” He’s a victim of his own bravado, a man who believed the tall tales he told himself more than he believed in the love right in front of him.
This isn’t a song about a man looking for forgiveness from his lost love. It’s about a man seeking to forgive himself. He knows, deep down, that his “excuses were only lies,” but he clings to them because the truth—that he’s the one who threw away a good thing—is too heavy to bear. The song is a beautiful, melancholic waltz, carried by Robbins’s signature smooth, yet world-weary voice. It speaks to anyone who has ever looked back on a relationship and wished they had done things differently, who has ever felt the sting of a past mistake. The very act of listening to it can feel like a confession, a shared moment of human frailty. Marty Robbins wasn’t just a singer of cowboy ballads; he was a troubadour of the heart, unafraid to explore the darker corners of the human condition. “Making Excuses” stands as a powerful testament to that, a quiet, mournful anthem for all the moments we’ve wished we could take back.
Oldies Songs