LYRICS:

And so it is just like you said it would be
Life goes easy on me
Most of the time
And so it is the shorter story
No love, no glory
No hero in her sky
I can’t take my eyes off of you
I can’t take my eyes off you
I can’t take my eyes off of you
I can’t take my eyes off you
I can’t take my eyes off you
I can’t take my eyes
And so it is just like you said it should be
We’ll both forget the breeze
Most of the time
And so it is the colder water
The Blower’s Daughter
The pupil in denial
I can’t take my eyes off of you
I can’t take my eyes off you
I can’t take my eyes off of you
I can’t take my eyes off you
I can’t take my eyes off you
I can’t take my eyes
Did I say that I loathe you?
Did I say that I want to
Leave it all behind?
I can’t take my mind off of you
I can’t take my mind off you
I can’t take my mind off of you
I can’t take my mind off you
I can’t take my mind off you
I can’t take my mind
My mind my mind
‘Til I find somebody new

Here are two of the most popular song interpretations

1) The song is about the daughter of Rice’s clarinet teacher (the “blower”).

2) This one gets pretty interesting, and Rice confirms that it is indeed fiction, as he never worked at a call center:

Like many great songwriters, Damien Rice was part of the proletariat before he earned a living in music. Growing up in Kildare County, Ireland, he found himself working at a call center in the late ’90s. His job was to cold call households and try to sell them products like insurance and mortgages. As anyone who has engaged a telemarketer in conversation is aware, this is a miserable job and one that requires a bit of mental dissociation. On one of Rice’s calls, a woman answered the phone and began such a dialogue.

As Rice told the story when he would introduce the song at concerts, he enjoyed speaking to this lady and became smitten. They spoke for about an hour that day, not about financial products but about their hopes and dreams, developing quite a rapport by the end of the talk. For months, Rice “followed the lead” by calling her during his shifts, where they would continue their increasingly intimate chats.

Then one day she stopped answering. In these days before the proliferation of the internet, tracking down an unrequited love was more complicated than a Google search, but Rice was determined to find this woman. From his call list, he determined the address associated with the phone number, and he hopped a bus to the residence. He hid in the bushes until the woman emerged, and when she did, she was on her way to school – the woman was just a girl, maybe 16 years old.

Crestfallen, Rice realized that when he had called, she was on summer vacation, and she stopped answering when it was time to return to school. She had been using him for entertainment, and Rice was devastated. “The Blower’s Daughter” was the song he wrote about the incident.