Creativity Quote by Roy Orbison

Roy Orbison isn’t bragging about a perfect romance here; he’s staging a domestic standoff and calling it love anyway. The line snaps with blues logic: affection measured not in sweetness, but in bite. “Mean as she can be” sounds like complaint until he undercuts it with that sly admission - “almost as mean as me.” Suddenly the speaker isn’t a victim of a difficult woman; he’s met his match, and that parity is the point.

The intent is half confession, half flirtation. Orbison frames “mean” less as cruelty than as toughness, sharpness, a refusal to be managed. By placing her meanness beside his own, he smuggles in self-awareness: he knows he’s hard to live with, and he’s drawn to someone who won’t play the soft, forgiving role. The subtext is mutual recognition, the romantic charge of equality in a culture that often expects women to soothe and men to swagger. Here, the swagger survives, but it’s tempered by a wink: if she’s hell, it’s because he’s been hell first.

Context matters. Orbison’s era in rock and roll still trafficked in possessive, idealized femininity, yet the blues tradition made room for women who could “do you wrong” and men who deserved it. The lyric keeps that tradition while turning it intimate, almost comedic. It works because it compresses an entire relationship dynamic into one punchline: love as a sparring match where the real intimacy is admitting you’re both capable of throwing the same punch.