I know what she looks like, her face and skin, her smell and the rest I know the feel of her soul, but God help me I just cannot find her address Oh and I've how I've tried but now all that's left Is my old friend distance and sweet loneliness
Like pretty much all Frank’s songs on relationships, this one too deals with a breakup. His lover has left, leaving Frank and his old friend loneliness to “slip back into their groove.” Cheerful. More so when we learn that the titular “better half” is not Frank’s, but his ex-lover’s: specifically, her new man. Ouch.
The begins by referring to loneliness as a friend, a personification that echoes Simon & Garfunkel’s opening line on “The Sound of Silence.”