THE WHITE ROOM
(Words and Music by Rick Springfield and Jim Vallance)

I can see her at her windows watching
Locked away inside her skin
I can see her but I can't get to her
She won't come out
And she won't let me into
The white room
She's living in
Lying alone 'til she comes undone
In the white room
She burns for the real thing
But it won't come

In her head is the same obsession
And all the bottles and pills won't heal her heart
She heard his last confession
Every word just tears her apart
In the white room
Locked away
Doing time 'til her time is done
In the white room
There's so much to say
But the words won't come

Come back to the land of the living
When you gonna break that chain
There's much too much that you're leaving
And you're never gonna stop the rain
In the white room
Waiting for the call that never comes
In the white room
She waits

Look at something long enough you'll find
That the splinters and the cracks begin to show
I'll be the first in line
When the walls start falling
And she lets go of
The white room
It's late
Living alone only makes you numb
In the white room
She burns for the real thing
But it won't come

Come back to the land of the living
When you gonna break that chain
There's much too much that you're leaving
And you're never gonna stop the rain
In the white room
She's living in
Doing time 'til her time is done
In the white room
She burns

In the white room
It's late
Lying alone till she comes undone
In the white room she waits

In the white room
Yeah
In the white room
In the white room...

(total playing time 3:22)

Rick says: This one I re-wrote pretty drastically as it's the oldest song on the album. I wrote it with Jim Vallance in '93 I think - melodicrock.com (note, Rick was a little off on his timing, it was written January, 1990 while he was filming Dead Reckoning)

Rick also says:  Ah, ...  a story about ... meaning - just being inside your head. The person who's inside their head ... the White Room being my, ah, obscure reference to your skull ...the brain inside the skull - eiozine.com

Song Facts: This can be found on Karma.

Jim Vallance says: even though we'd been in the same room when we wrote the lyric, we'd each been on a different wave-length ... pulling inspiration from completely different places.
 When we were writing the song I was thinking about the book "The French Lieutenant's Woman", the story of a lonely woman who spends her days looking out to sea, waiting for her French Lieutenant to return. I imagined her in a white room ... waiting, slowly coming apart at the seams (the book was turned into a film, starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons).

Here are the partial lyrics from the original demo:

I See her looking out her window
Thinking about the original sin
I can see her, but I can't get to her
She won't come out and she won't let me in

To her White Room, (she's waiting)
Lying alone until she comes undone
In the white room, she waits for love
(and love won't come)

In her hand there's a faded letter
a broken promise and another broken heart
It's all he ever gave her 
Every word just tears her apart

In the White room, she's fading
Crying alone til the day is done
In the white room she waits for love
But love won't come

Come back to the land of the living
When you gonna shake that chain.....

 According to US

I've always liked this song and I'm so surprised how many people list this as their least favorite on the cd. Before I stopped to try to figure out what the song was saying, I just liked the tune of it. My favorite part is "I can see her but I can't get to her, she won't come out and she won't let me in".

Once I figured out this was about depression, I liked the song even more. 
I think it really does paint an accurate picture of how people go inside themselves and it really just makes it worse, and often they can't be reached. I always thought the phrase "his last confession" referred to infidelity in her relationship that sent her over the edge.  - rlh

Do you think maybe this song is the "Just One Kiss" of the Karma album? Ok, maybe not in the vein that Rick will be embarrassed of it 20 years from now, but along the lines of it being a filler track and not necessarily one that Rick spent a lot of time on. I just get that feeling from this song. I realized when I went to write down some thoughts regarding "The White Room" that I really didn't have an opinion on it. So I listened, and listened some more. In between watching VH1 Classics <wink> I started to believe this would have been a good Mr. Mister song. :-)

I love the flow-y feel of the music, it sort of glides along like ROTH does earlier in the album. However, I wish it was more love song than what it ends up being. It was not a hard puzzle to try and decipher what Rick was referencing when referring to "The White Room". I do like the simile though, that the white room is inside her head - or - the padded cell image one conjures up when thinking of someone in a mental institution. One of the best lines of this album is in this song too, "Look at something long enough you'll find that the splinters and the cracks begin to show". Ain't that the truth? -  Michelle P.

When I first heard this song for the first time, I had not heard about what the "white room" was (was it a room that was painted white?), so I was kind of at a loss for the meaning in this song. When I heard it was about being inside one's skull...it was like..ooohhhh, that's what it means .... and, when you really think about it, the song is really quite cleaver. I really like this song because sometimes we have past feelings or thoughts of things we have gone through in our lives that we just won't let out of our own white room, and memories like that can only haunt you. 

Come back to the land of the living
When you gonna break that chain
There's much too much that you're leaving 
And you're never gonna stop the rain 
In the white room
Waiting for the call that never comes
 - Charlotte Poe