I’ve Been Waitin' for Tomorrow (All of My Life), is the opening track to The The’s seminal album Soul Mining.

Matt Johnson explores the dynamic between his yearn for personal goals and his newfound sense of their impossibility he’s faced with whilst transitioning into the struggles of adulthood. He speaks of heartbreak and abandonment as blights that subdue his proactivity and leave him with a sense of helplessness as he’s just “waitin' for tomorrow” to start following his dreams. But it never seems to come (“another year older and what have i done”).

Matt cleverly conveys the hopelessness and cyclic nature of this mind state throughout the first verse and the chorus, whilst also alluding that he knows there is an escape, but struggles finding the strength to force himself from this easier but less satisfying way of living.

In the later verses, Matt almost comes to accept this despair as reality and finishes the song with despair that his dreams aren’t achievable. This is immediately juxtaposed to the listener by the existence of this track that the artistic struggle Matt writes of has inspired.