Clint Black once sang, “You won’t believe the things a heart can tell a mind;” he was singing of self-deception, one of the many topics troubling “Tonight”’s narrator. You see, what we have here is another cheating song, but this one—this one’s an odd bird. Evans here is positing the strange philosophical trope of cheating as self-awareness. “Know thyself,” Shakespeare once said, but I don’t believe he meant for us to sleep around in order to do so.
Actually, the song’s narrator doesn’t exactly advocate that action either, but consider this: she spends much less time speaking of her object de l’amour than she does struggling with her own culpability—and her own understanding of her own culpability. She spends half of one verse speaking of her feelings for her dark-end-of-the-street partner, and for the remainder of the songs she’s either justifying her actions (“there’s some things only lonely understands,” “Don’t the lies come easy baby when the truth just ain’t worth the fight”), questioning them (“I don’t know what’s wrong baby and I sure don’t know what’s right”), or deceiving herself (“Wrong can feel so right” followed by “I don’t know what’s wrong baby”).
Maybe, though, she’s just trying to understand herself for the first time in her life. Though she’s not quite there yet, not fully free, she’s on the right path; she’s reflecting, and she’s starting to see life, see herself, with the rose-colored glasses—if not completely off her face yet—sliding down the bridge of her nose. She recognizes her weaknesses, and she sees her situation for (at least part) of what it is (“I might just be a sinner wanting to be a saint/One justifies the reasons one understands the pain”). Maybe she’s been stifled (“I’ve held it all together”) for so long, all her life perhaps, that she’s just now beginning to see herself as an independent woman: one with thoughts and desires all her own; one whose thoughts, feelings, and actions will no longer be dictated to her by others; One who is finally beginning to experience herself and freedom for the first time. She's Music Row's Nora Helmer.
Cheating=self-awarness. Self-awareness=freedom. Cheating=freedom. What?!? Surely not. Well, in this case, it fits. What about the family? What about her kids? Well, she wants to leave them, too. Really, she does--in a mainstream country song, at that! It’s all in the song. Go back and listen to it. You won’t believe the things a heart can tell a mind.
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