In I Can’t Be on Time, Abby London offers an extremely personal and truthful recounting of the burden of living up to expectations both from within and from others. The lyrics count the cost against the emotional cost of living always late, both metaphorically and physically, as part of living. Abby describes how time controls her, treating her like an innocent child, and this experience of being at its mercy generates self-doubting and shaming cycles.

The song examines how time becomes an enemy—an passing judgment one, infuriated one, and manipulative one. Abby does not float around the struggle attempting to. What she does instead is to relate the genuine perplexity and sadness that come from never quite being certain one knows one’s own. She wonders if others experience this and feel this, and this does something to render the lyrics ultra-familiar. Everyone has known the quiet question: why am I continuously behind if doing this much?

There also is an eloquent protestation of resistance. Abby never gives up to humiliation. She protests by asserting things showing also a spark of rage but of liberation. She thinks of saying she cannot come on time and asking others to take her as she is. There is, though, an act of courage and control over self. It’s giving up to something and not giving up. It’s giving up the impossible and giving up to accepting oneself.

These last lines call into question all of time itself, even the calendar, and how far she questions those rules under which we live. The lyrics to Abby are intimate and yet question the larger frame. The lyrics are clever and critical and yet vulnerable and suggestive. In those lyrics, she expresses all those people and others like them who feel as though they’ve been misfits in this world where time marches by tight schedules, and she does this and does it with comfort and pity and not condemnation.