This is a hauntingly beautiful song about introspection, specifically about looking back at a relationship that started bad and ended so poorly, that the narrator wants to go back to the very beginning and tell himself to not even travel down that road. I believe that the relationship started poorly because of the lines:
"Take me back to the night we met:When the night was full of terrors: And your eyes were filled with tears: When you had not touched me yet"
So, the first night was not a great start, but the narrator pursued the relationship and eventually both overcame the rough start to fall in love with each other:
"I had all and then most of you"
Like many relationships that turn sour, it was not a quick decline, but a gradual one where the narrator and their partner fall out of love and gradually grow apart
"Some and now none of you"
Losing someone who was once everything in your world, who you could confide in, tell your secrets to, share all the most intimate parts of your life, to being strangers with that person is probably one of the most painful experiences a person can go through. So Painful, the narrator wants to go back in time and tell himself to not even pursue the relationship.
This was the perfect song for "13 Reasons Why"
Never thought of Hades
Under the Mississippi
But still I've come to sing for him
So southern furies
Prepare to walk for my harp
I have strung, and I will leave with him
Relax the cogs of rhyme
Over the Memphis sky
Turn back the wheels of time
Under the Memphis skyline
always hated him for the way he looked
In the gaslight of the morning
Then came hallelujah sounding like Ophelia
for me in my room living
So kiss me, my darling stay with me till morning
Turn back and you will stay
Under the Memphis Skyline
Under the Mississippi
But still I've come to sing for him
So southern furies
Prepare to walk for my harp
I have strung, and I will leave with him
Relax the cogs of rhyme
Over the Memphis sky
Turn back the wheels of time
Under the Memphis skyline
always hated him for the way he looked
In the gaslight of the morning
Then came hallelujah sounding like Ophelia
for me in my room living
So kiss me, my darling stay with me till morning
Turn back and you will stay
Under the Memphis Skyline
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The Night We Met
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Radiohead
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Same ideas expressed in Fitter, Happier are expressed in this song. We're told to strive for some sort of ideal life, which includes getting a good job, being kind to everyone, finding a partner, getting married, having a couple kids, living in a quiet neighborhood in a nice big house, etc. But in Fitter, Happier the narrator(?) realizes that it's incredibly robotic to live this life. People are being used by those in power "like a pig in a cage on antibiotics"--being pacified with things like new phones and cool gadgets and houses while being sucked dry. On No Surprises, the narrator is realizing how this life is killing him slowly. In the video, his helmet is slowly filling up with water, drowning him. But he's so complacent with it. This is a good summary of the song. This boring, "perfect" life foisted upon us by some higher powers (not spiritual, but political, economic, etc. politicians and businessmen, perhaps) is not the way to live. But there is seemingly no way out but death. He'd rather die peacefully right now than live in this cage. While our lives are often shielded, we're in our own protective bubbles, or protective helmets like the one Thom wears, if we look a little harder we can see all the corruption, lies, manipulation, etc. that is going on in the world, often run by huge yet nearly invisible organizations, corporations, and 'leaders'. It's a very hopeless song because it reflects real life.
Blue
Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran
“Blue” is a song about a love that is persisting in the discomfort of the person experiencing the emotion. Ed Sheeran reflects on love lost, and although he wishes his former partner find happiness, he cannot but admit his feelings are still very much there. He expresses the realization that he might never find another on this stringed instrumental by Aaron Dessner.
Head > Heels
Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran
“Head > Heels” is a track that aims to capture what it feels like to experience romance that exceeds expectations. Ed Sheeran dedicates his album outro to a lover who has blessed him with a unique experience that he seeks to describe through the song’s nuanced lyrics.
Plastic Bag
Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran
“Plastic Bag” is a song about searching for an escape from personal problems and hoping to find it in the lively atmosphere of a Saturday night party. Ed Sheeran tells the story of his friend and the myriad of troubles he is going through. Unable to find any solutions, this friend seeks a last resort in a party and the vanity that comes with it.
“I overthink and have trouble sleepin’ / All purpose gone and don’t have a reason / And there’s no doctor to stop this bleedin’ / So I left home and jumped in the deep end,” Ed Sheeran sings in verse one. He continues by adding that this person is feeling the weight of having disappointed his father and doesn’t have any friends to rely on in this difficult moment. In the second verse, Ed sings about the role of grief in his friend’s plight and his dwindling faith in prayer. “Saturday night is givin’ me a reason to rely on the strobe lights / The lifeline of a promise in a shot glass, and I’ll take that / If you’re givin’ out love from a plastic bag,” Ed sings on the chorus, as his friend turns to new vices in hopes of feeling better.
Wainwright's weaving the myth of Orpheus's attempt to redeem his bride Eurydice from the Underworld with the tragic drowning of Jeff Buckley is one of the saddest and beautiful moments in contemporary music.
In the myth, Orpheus's wife dies. However, he could play his lyre so sweetly that it even melted the heart of Hades himself. Hades agreed to release Eurydice back into the living world with her beloved husband on one condition--that Orpheus walks ahead of her and both do not look back until they've reached the world above. In his nervous excitement, Orpheus looks back just as his feet touch the mortal earth, and Eurydice vanishes back into Hades forever. This must be why Rufus sings "turn back" twice during his song. I think it's a song about many things--desire, jealousy, adoration. But I think, on a more elemental level, it's also about letting a person be dead.
The water imagery flows in from both Greek myth and from Shakespeare's "Hamlet". Orpheus's own death was tragic, being torn apart by Maenads (female servants of Dionysius) while minding his own business at an oracle. They lopped off his head and sent it floating down the river along with his lyre. In "Hamlet", Ophelia drowns herself from apparent madness over the murder of her father by Hamlet, coupled with the denouncement of their relationship ("get thee to a nunnery") by Hamlet himself.
I think it's one of his best.
Yes, indeed this song is about Jeff Buckley. Rufus was jealous of Jeff for the longest time because they wouldnt let him play at sin'e. They hung out one night and Rufus realized that Jeff wasnt such a bad guy after all. Jeff died little than a month later, and Rufus wrote this song for him. Read the rolling stones interview with Rufus
This is a song about Jeff Buckley! Listen to it, read the story of how Jeff died....Hades under the Mississippi....Memphis......the way he looked....Hallelujah...Turn back and you will stay under the Memphis Skyline...do you see it? I do.
He uses the Orpheus myth to great effect. This is such a painful song.
Yeah, Rufus and Jeff Buckley became friends shortly before Buckley's death. I believe Rufus has said of Buckley 'He was lovely' but they did rival each other for a very long time.
i think i heard a reference to river pheonix in there too. such sad stories...
I think you are talking about his other song Matinee Idol, aries
I think you are talking about his other song Matinee Idol, aries
this song flows through itself like water, it's so beautiful. it's less a song with refrains than one long, ethereal moment with rises and falls that break meters and keys, one fluid movement that twinkles, rising cautiously into "so kiss me..." (such a plaintive and beautiful line), then crescendoes to a big rapture of strings and muted horns and rufus's opaque, languid vibrato, and then almost evaporates into the last fading, transparent piano chords. the lyrics hide the story of jeff buckley's death in such thick layers of this modernized, romantic myth of orpheus that it's poetry freed from any connection to time or place. to put it simply, all this blather means that Memphis Skyline is completely entrancing. it took me many listens of want two to catch onto it and then fall in love with it. in my opinion, it's certainly rufus wainwright's best song on want two, if not of all time.