About The Song
Patty Loveless released “Don’t Toss Us Away” as a single on February 14, 1989. It was the second single from her album *Honky Tonk Angel*, which MCA Nashville had issued the previous fall. Tony Brown produced the track. The song had first appeared in 1985 on the debut album by the country-rock band Lone Justice. Bryan MacLean wrote it. MacLean had been a member of the 1960s rock group Love, the same band that recorded “Alone Again Or.”
Loveless first heard the song while riding in a car with her brother Roger Ramey and producer Tony Brown. All three of them agreed the ballad suited her voice. When she went into the studio to cut it, Maria McKee showed up. McKee was MacLean’s half-sister and the lead singer of Lone Justice. She told Loveless that the way she was singing the song was exactly how her brother had always intended it to sound.
The lyric is a quiet plea. Couples all around them are falling apart. The singer sees the same coldness creeping into her own relationship. She reminds him of everything they have already built together and asks him not to throw it away without a fight. She still loves him and wants him to stay. The chorus repeats the simple request: don’t toss us away so thoughtlessly.
The single spent 17 weeks on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart and reached number 5 the week of May 6, 1989. It also peaked at number 15 on the Canadian RPM Country Tracks chart and finished the year at number 68 on Billboard’s year-end country list. The album *Honky Tonk Angel* would go on to produce Loveless’s first number-one single, “Timber, I’m Falling in Love,” a few months later.
Jim May directed the music video. It features Loveless in a series of quiet, intimate scenes that match the tone of the song. One location used for the video was a covered bridge near Clarksville, Tennessee, and a local church stood in for a wedding sequence. Members of the congregation appeared as extras.
Video
Lyric
Well It seems that everyone we’ve known
Their love’s grown cold will
Will ours stand as stone?
One by one they break.
It’s such a shame.
and now you say that you want to do the same.
Don’t toss us a-way so thoughtlessly
It just ain’t right
Oh can’t you see
I still love you
I want you to stay
Darling please, don’t toss us away
(ending Darling please, don’t toss us away.)
Well just think of all that we’ve been through
The world we’re building me and you
How could all those years be tossed away
In just one moment in just one day.
CHROUS
Don’t toss us away It just ain’t right
To let love just die without a fight
I still love you
I Want you to stay
Darling please
Don’t toss us away
So now I’m asking once again to understand to be my friend
Oh it hurt so bad to think you’d go Still the same I love you so.
CHORUS