Fell in Love with an Alien

This song appeared in 1996 on the album Almost Heaven by The Kelly Family.

It caught my attention for two reasons. First, it's a beautiful song, but I couldn't figure out what it was actually about.

Without looking at the lyrics, I kept hearing “I fell in love with the right” instead of “I fell in love with her eyes.” That was scratching at my mind. Why would falling in love with an alien be the right choice?

Another surprise was discovering that it was sung by Paddy Kelly, a boy. I had always thought it was a girl singing.

So, one thing inadvertently led to another. I started looking up the lyrics and then trying to understand what the hell they actually meant.

The most confusing part was this:

A scarecrow appeared, and chased her in fear
She sent me her love, her love to me

These lines don't seem to make any sense unless they're describing separate events.

First, a “scarecrow” chases her, which leads her to the narrator. This could mean that the “scarecrow” is the “homeboy” mentioned earlier in the song, a rival who wasn't the “Romeo” she was looking for.

Instead, she came to the narrator, fell in love, and they created a big family.

And I think that's the clue.

If you look into who The Kelly Family actually are, you'll discover that their father, Daniel Kelly, had eight children with their mother, Barbara.

So what if the narrator is actually Daniel, and the “alien” with the beautiful eyes is Barbara?

Daniel and Barbara met in Spain, where she worked as a nanny for his children from a previous marriage. This could also explain why Barbara is described as an “alien”: someone who entered his already established world from outside.

And suddenly, the story starts making sense.

Coming back to the “scarecrow,” which might be a mocking reference to a possible rival, I can't help but wonder whether Barbara was already gone when the song was written. She died in 1982, fourteen years before the album was released. But that's just a thought.

I don't know whether this was the intended meaning of the song. Still, the more I look at the lyrics and the family's history, the more I wonder whether Fell in Love with an Alien is actually a love story about Daniel and Barbara Kelly.