“White Room” became a charting hit for Cream, peaking at the No. 6 position on the Billboard Hot 100. It is usurped only by “Sunshine of Your Love” for Cream’s highest charting hit. It’s an undeniable staple in the short-lived, yet deeply influential rock group’s catalog.
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Is “White Room” as simple as it sounds? Did the band really write a song about a white room? Find out below.
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Behind the Meaning
“White Room” is the brainchild of frontman Jack Bruce and lyricist Pete Brown. Bruce developed the early iterations of the track, citing Jimi Hendrix as an influence.
“The inspiration for the music came from meeting Jimi Hendrix and his approach to playing,” Bruce once said. “In fact, he came to the recording session of that in New York and said to me, ‘I wish I could write something like that.’ I said, ‘But it comes from you!’
“It’s a synthesis of things and not a completely original chord sequence,” he continued. “It’s the way we placed certain things in time that makes it original. I had problems with the record company because of the introduction being 5/4 and those suspended second inversion chords. They didn’t think it would make it.”
After Bruce had fleshed out the chord structure, Brown began to figure the lyrics out. The first draft of the song was a depressed rambling about a hippie girl titled “Cinderella’s Last Goodnight.” That idea wasn’t much of a hit for Bruce so the lyricist dipped into his archives. He emerged with a poem that would become “White Room.”
“There was this kind of transitional period where I lived in this actual white room and was trying to come to terms with various things that were going on,” Brown told SongFacts. “It’s a place where I stopped, I gave up all drugs and alcohol at that time in 1967 as a result of being in the white room, so it was a kind of watershed period. That song’s like a kind of weird little movie: it changes perspectives all the time. That’s why it’s probably lasted – it’s got a kind of mystery to it.”
The lyrics are riddled with metaphors, making it hard to decode at times. Nevertheless, it seems to live up to the explanation Brown gives for the original poem. He paints a vivid portrait of the titular white room and the personal journey he went on as a result of it.
In a white room with black curtains near the station
Black roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings
Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyes
Dawn light smiles on you leaving, my contentment
I’ll wait in this place where the sun never shines
Wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves
(Photo by Ivan Keeman/Redferns)
