Getting Accurate Life Goes On Lyrics Right
The song "Life Goes On" was originally written and recorded by Bobby Davis in 1958, then most famously re-recorded by George Michael in 1987 for the film Spies Like Us. It's a somber track about continuing forward through personal loss. The lyrics are straightforward but easy to get wrong if you're pulling from random lyric sites, which tend to be riddled with errors. For the George Michael version, the official lyrics appear on his Listening Hour album booklet and have been printed in licensed publications. The core verses run like this: "Life goes on, long after we fade / And you're not here to do all the things we planned we'd do together / Life goes on, but it goes slower / Now there's nothing I can do about it / Nothing that I would rather / My life would go on without you / No not another day without you / I can't go on, no I just can't go on."
I once spent about two hours trying to pin down the exact bridge lyrics because every fan site had slightly different wording. The problem was that George Michael ad-libs certain phrases live, so bootleg transcriptions vary wildly. The workaround was pulling the lyric sheet from the official Spying box set and cross-referencing it with the studio album sleeve. That's the version that matches the recorded track word for word. For the original Bobby Davis version, the lyrics are nearly identical in structure but differ in a few lines. The Davis recording is less commonly covered in transcription databases, which is why most results you find will default to the George Michael arrangement. If you're looking for the 1958 original, check the original RCA Victor pressing notes or the reissue liner notes from the Anthology of American Music series. There's also a notable cover by Diana Ross from her 1980 album To Love Again, and more recently a version by Kacey Musgraves that appeared on a tribute compilation. Each artist adjusts the lyrics slightly, so always confirm which version you're actually looking at before using the words for anything formal.
Common Mistakes When Searching
Most lyric aggregators conflate the Bobby Davis and George Michael versions as if they're the same song with the same words. They aren't quite. The melodic phrasing changed enough that some syllables shift between versions, and a few lines in the second verse get rearranged. If you're quoting these in writing, double-check which artist's recording you're transcribing from. Another issue: several sites list the song under alternate titles like "Life Goes On (Long After We're Gone)" because of how the opening line reads. Searching with just "Life Goes On" will pull up the Westlife version, the Olivia Newton-John reference, and half a dozen other tracks that share the phrase. Adding the artist name and the year cuts the noise significantly. The lyrics themselves aren't complicated, but the emotional weight of the song means people tend to fill in gaps with whatever sounds right emotionally rather than whatever is actually on the recording. I've seen "nothing that I would rather" misquoted as "nothing that I would ever want" on at least three major lyric databases. It sounds plausible. It's wrong.
Get the Full Details
If you need the complete verified text, the best sources are the album liner notes or the official music publishing sheet music. It's not free, but it's the only way to be certain you're working from the actual recorded lyrics and not some fan's best guess.
