Haunted

if you guys have ever noticed...its sounds like she's saying ba da pa pa pa. but if you really listen it kind of sounds like "para papa" which means "for dad" in spanish.. and she is half spanish cuz her dad was from MADRID. .so i think she kind of feels like she is being "haunted" by her fathers memory..

Personally I've heard it as "by the lies that wove the web". I favor this because it reduces the redundancy (saying "lives" twice in two lines doesn't seem to fit Poe's pattern of carefully thought-out lyrics). Also that builds upon the imagery of a "web of lies". This is something of a linchpin in my personal interpretation of the song...namely about becoming aware of the tricks and traps of one's own mental processes. She's taking inventory of all the various things in her head, with the goal of letting go of childhood and sadness ("build a casket for my tears"). Growing up is about embracing the rational creation of the self. So she's taking a last look at the phantoms that comprised her former psychology and although she feels a great love for the process that has gotten her to this point...she has to free herself and move on.

From what I've been told, Poe cleaned out her father's attic when he passed away, and she found tapes of speeches he made, and that's the recordings of her father that you hear in this CD. I love this CD, I listen to it over and over, it's so amazing, but I can't listen to it at night, because it just gives me chills. Such an amazingly constructed album, however. She wrote this album not only for her father, but to go along with her brother's book, House of Leaves.

Mark Z. D. is poes brother who Wrote a book called the House of Leaves, which is what this song is about. If you've read the book, You'll notice that the spoken words from Hey Pretty are in the book under the foot notes "Jonny" wrote

thought that was interresting...

on page 314 of house of leaves, daisy is on the staircase with chad, and they're both singing

"ba dah ba ba"... i thought that was interesting, cause poe sings that so much in this song.

The version I've heard also has some creepy little kid saying You think I'll cry? I won't cry. My heart will break before I cry. I will go mad.

Then the kid starts laughing/sobbing maniacly, its REALLY creepy O_O

I was introduced to this song in 2001 by a friend. It's vastly different to anything I would've listened to back then but it quickly became a favourite of mine. It just resonated with me for some reason and every now and then I would find myself singing this to my cat since she happened to be sitting on my chest while I was chilling listening to music.

I recall each time singing the part "I'll always want you, I'll always need you, I'll always love you. And I will always miss you." -- It's such a powerful part of the song and it always made me a little teary thinking about how some day my little baby girl won't be here.

That day came a few days back. I just played this song and even though I wept like a little bitch and felt completely empty now that I no longer have her with me, it also felt extraordinarily cathartic.

I'm probably still going to feel like shit for a while, but even though this song brings me to tears, at least for a few moments, I feel like she's not really gone and that I'm singing this to her again.

this is a long story and no one cares, but I'm going to tell it anyway.

sometime toward the end of high school an assignment was "recite a poem or song that means something to you" blah blah, you know how it is. anyway, i considered a few poems, but then i got this great idea to recite this song, because at the time i was playing this album a lot, and i'd just finished house of leaves.

anyway.

i recited it, etc, my teach at the time thought it was pretty beautiful for a song. however, a few months went by, and a conference was called. it seems my choice of song was the straw that broke the camel's back, and they got the idea i was suicidal based on my choice of this song for an assigment. heh.

besides all of that, this is an amazing song, poe rocks, she needs to release another album. now. it's strange how fitting the entirety of haunted is for me as an album, and this song, to this day, fits things that are haunting me perpetually... i guess the ghosts of your past are something you just have to learn to live with.

I don't get the song being about her dead father, but then again I got the album after reading House of Leaves, and this song appeals to me directly as someone lost in the house. It reminds me the most of Karen, Will Navidson's wife.

"Hallways....always" is a direct reference to the book. The recurrent echoes throughout brings to mind the chapter of Zampano's work on the Navidson Record about the significance of echoes and how they distort our messages. "Shadows keep on changing" and "the hallways in this tiny room" also seem straight from the book to me.

About being haunted by your past.