"Tyler Lambert was Dana Plato's son (see February 17); Plato struggled with addiction from an early age, like many child entertainers. She was twenty years old when she became a mother. She lost custody of her son, Tyler, in divorce proceedings, when he was six; nine hard years down the line, in her Winnebago RV parked outside her manager's mother's house, she died of an overdose. Tyler was fourteen. A decade on he took his own life with a shotgun. "These past ten years have been pure Hell", his grandmother told People magazine. This is a sad story of people trying without success to break free from the past, of compulsions and apparitions. It is a song about the desperate feeling you get when you have run out of hopeful synonyms for "try"."
-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.
