| The National – Heavenfaced Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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That second-to-last bit is amazing: "She’s a griever, my believer" So the narrator is talking about how this woman approaches things solemnly and seriously and what she means to him... "It’s not a fever, it’s a freezer" ...and how her way of seeing things isn't feverish (she's not "heavenfaced," she's not "high") but cold... "I believe her, I'm a griever now" ...and how he eventually is won over to her way of looking at things. A really smart way of communicating the sort of circular nature of that kind of conversion, and one that fits well with the rest of the lyrics. |
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| Ramona Falls – I Say Fever Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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"So what's the reason for this ridiculous delay?" If I had to guess, he thinks he's not in a sufficiently objective or analytical mindset to make so serious a decision. This is what might give that away: "How dare I feel this and do naught but sit on my hands. I say, 'Fever.'" If those two lines actually are sequential in the story, his explanation for his own inaction is fever, presumably as in a feverish emotion that needs to be tempered by a long wait: "Hold my heart like a hot potato, push the clock for an hour later." He's not going to make a decision until his heart calms down and, one thinks, lets his rational brain take over. But of course this is a disastrous strategy, especially when the cool-down period is FIVE YEARS. As for the ploughman/piper thing, well...damned if I know. The best I can come up with is that he wants to locate the ploughman in himself - the grinder, the hard worker, the blue-collar thinker - and expel the piper - the flighty, energetic, irresponsible thinker. It's a bit of a stretch, granted, but it's all I got. You've hit the nail on the head, by the way, about oppressive social circumstances. This guy is obviously fenced in on all sides by self-appointed experts who in reality don't know jack. It would've been one thing, I think, if the object of his desire hadn't put herself in the same camp, but it's just not realistic to think you can singlehandedly reshape somebody else's thought process when that person has the weight of common knowledge behind them. Add that to this person's seeming inexperience (naivete, one might even say) and he basically never had a shot. |
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| Ramona Falls – Russia Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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THANK YOU for posting these lyrics - I was having the damnedest time trying to figure out what he was saying. As for the song, I think it pretty much speaks for itself. The only thing I want to draw attention to is his writing: the interior rhyme, the trademark off-kilter rhythm, the crazy imagery. It actually reminds me somewhat of a few Irish folksongs and stories, which seem to have a similar focus on Great Deeds that somehow lead to even more problems. Another very good song on an album full of them. |
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| Ramona Falls – Melectric Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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The only part that I don't think fits is this: "please don't you give me false hope you're free to go i don't want you to cope" If it's a relationship then "you" makes sense. But if it's about art, who is this "you" person? A muse? Art itself? It's sort of unclear. Also, again, the end seems to me to say that he's going to burn it down - "set the fire" doesn't feel like a constructive idea in this context but rather a destructive one. So if it's about art...has he decided to destroy his artistic interest? Probably you have answers for this, I'm just not seeing them... |
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| Ramona Falls – Clover Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Agreed - it's definitely "I bent (or maybe bend) the tips all over." It might also be "...or when it returns" instead of "or will it return," but the smooth/rough thing sounds right to me. I feel like this is maybe the undiscovered theme song for "(500) Days of Summer." This guy is apparently in a casual relationship with somebody who he really has feelings for: it's just "fun," but he wants her (when she, of course, doesn't want him). This has the obvious consequences - he feels like he's laboring, like their time together has passed its expiration date, like she can just "choose a different story." There's a pretty deep level of emotional damage here, what with him being confused and frustrated, but his heart won't let him leave because he needs to know that requited love exists. (At least, that's my interpretation; the lyrics are of course intentionally vague about "it," which is maybe the point - if he doesn't know what it is he wants, how can he find it?) If I understand the stuff about trees correctly, it's a metaphor for him sort of reshaping her natural desires to make him the center: trees point to stars all on their own, but he's going to bend them over so they point at something else instead. Like I said - sort of the plot of "(500) Days of Summer" in a nutshell. |
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| Ramona Falls – Melectric Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Certainly there's a soured relationship here, but it's not exactly right (I think) to say that he wants to restart it. In fact, by the end of the song I'd say he reaches the opposite conclusion: he's going to torch it. He does want an energized relationship ("electricity"), but this one doesn't really fit the bill - she has "to cope" and misrepresent herself just to stick around, he thinks it'd make him feel lonelier to stay in the relationship than to leave it. There's sort of a catch-22 in that leaving reinforces that selfsame doubt, but until he leaves he'll never be able to say for sure whether he's "capable of waking up these dreams." For me, the key notion in this song is fighting to let a relationship die: there's such a prevalent social mythology about the need to fight to maintain relationships that the other side rarely (if ever) gets a word in edgewise. Especially after you've "come this far," the conventional wisdom says you have to keep going. But there definitely are times when it's best to break it off, and it looks like the narrator found one. |
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| Ramona Falls – Always Right Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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A few of these words might be wrong, like maybe it's "scan" instead of "skim" in the third verse. Anyway, a very entertaining song - the rhyming is really impressive, his composing is (as always) superb, and the vocals even give the song a little more depth than it would otherwise have (in particular, check out the crazed intensity in his voice on "It says right here I'm..." at the end of the third verse). So far as I can tell, the song is sung from the perspective of a guy who has a gnawing suspicion that his significant other has been holding back their true feelings. Probably this other person just isn't that into him - they aren't gonna "shake their life" or "sell their kids" by any stretch - but he feels like there's something under the surface ("in their diaries") that's being artificially held back ("kid gloves"). He's also evidently a little full of himself, what with the talk of "giving the gift of light," which almost certainly isn't helping matters any. There's not a whole lot of deep meaning to take away from the song, I guess, cause everyone pretty much already knows not to be this guy, but Knopf just expresses this character so spot-on that it's really hard not to enjoy listening. |
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| Iron & Wine – The Devil Never Sleeps Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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egyptianeskimo, I think you're very close. I'm not sure that this isn't supposed to be written mostly literally - as in, really from the perspective of a child. You can sort of see him trying to step into shoes that are too big for him, getting the military haircut and playing with switchblades and butchering livestock. The warning at the end of the song - "no one lives forever and the devil never sleeps alone" - comes across like the advice of a Cassandra figure, accurate and yet useless until it's too late. It seems to me to have two applications in this song: first and most obviously the people who started this war that's taking people away never to return; but also, and ironically, those of us who remain who are so caught up in our own tragedies that we lose sight of the fact that other people need help (trying to garden in freezing weather, refusing even to lend someone a quarter to make a call). There is, similar to the rest of the album, a feeling of frustrated escapist longings: train tracks that run into the sea, a telephone you can't use, a bunch of people too afraid to cross the street, and, of course, nothing on the radio to take one's mind off of what's going on. There's clearly something rudderless about the person talking in this song, and I think it's relatively obvious that, as people have been saying, the radio isn't the real problem. Rather, the problem is our weird belief that radio and other pop media can serve as legitimate substitutes for things like parents. The radio, then, is playing the same stuff it always has been and always will be, but situations like this demonstrate how little that stuff is needed. |
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| The Decemberists – Margaret in Captivity Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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As a pop song this wouldn't work at all, but as a piece on the album I think it does just fine. In particular, this (along w/ "The Wanting Comes In Waves/Repaid") highlight Colin's vocal talent: it's *hard* to distill a whole character into a manner of singing, but you can very clearly hear the rake coming through and this song. I am a little weirded out by the reference to kickstands, though - it smacks as anachronistic, but I probably shouldn't be complaining about that when he sets the story near three landmarks that are not really anywhere near each other. |
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| The Decemberists – The Wanting Comes in Waves (Reprise) Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| There's also a sort of double entendre on "in waves": originally, it meant that the wanting comes and goes whereas here it (obviously) means that the wanting comes while he is literally in waves. A nice mini-motif and some foreshadowing if you're somehow smart enough to catch it the first time around. | |
| The Decemberists – The Wanting Comes in Waves (Reprise) Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| Well, if you're right about William having just killed the rake (at his fortress, remember), it stands to reason that Margaret and William would at that point be criminals in whatever land was across the river. I'd probably be in a hurry, too, if I'd just invaded some foreign territory and murdered someone there. | |
| The Books – An Owl with Knees Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| I think it's "Eat dry straw," actually | |
| Caribou – Sandy Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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"Now I'm divided like a flock of birds when it's sighted", I think Nothing yet on the second stanza... |
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| Caribou – She's the one Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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I'm pretty sure that first word has to be "effete." Plus, if you can't tell by the fact that I'm here proposing lyrics, I think this is another highly entertaining record from Caribou. |
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| Iron & Wine – Resurrection Fern Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| Remember that "amen" is just an agreement to what was said previously - it's dependent on there being something already there in the first place in order to attain its meaning. So, if you're someone who doesn't have anything to say (to God, presumably), it's literally meaningless. I suspect this is supposed to reflect the helplessness of a baby bird - they can't even leave the nest to feed themselves. Also, this echoes the helplessness of children in general, thus (if my prior interpretation was right) alluding to the couple's own dead child. | |
| Iron & Wine – Wolves (Song of the Shepherd's Dog) Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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Well, I would correct the mistakes in the lyrics above, but there are so many (sory) that I'll just give the right ones: Wolves by the road And a bike wheel spinning on a pawn shop wall She'll wring out her colored hair Like a butterfly beaten in a summer rainfall And then roll on the kitchen floor With some fucker with a pocketful of foreign change Song of the shepherd’s dog A pitch in the dark in the ear of the lamb Who's going to try to run away Whoever got that brave? Wolves in the middle of town And the chapel bell ringing through the wind-blown trees She'll wave to the butcher’s boy With the parking lot music everybody believes And then dive like a dying bird To any dude with a dollar in the penny arcade Song of the shepherd’s dog Waiter and the check or a rooster on the rooftop waiting for day And you know what he's gonna say Wolves at the end of the bed And a postcard hidden in her winter clothes She weep in the back of a truck To the traitors only trying to find her bullet hole And then run down the canopy road To some mother with a baby and a cross to bear Song of the shepherd’s dog Little brown flea in the bottle of oil For your wool and wild hair* You'll never get him out of there *seriously, this really does sound like "woolly, wild hair." If I didn't have the lyric sheet I'd have no idea Okay, so I think megabyte is on the right track in saying that this is a song about escaping, for various definitions of the word "escape." The first stanza, I think, is just brilliant. It starts off with wolves (danger) on the road (the way out), and then we get the bike wheel. I feel like I could go on for days about that bike wheel. It's a FANTASTIC image. For one thing, a bike is the poor man's (or, in this case, woman's) car, so that - along with the fact that it's spinning - represent motion, escape. But it's stuck on the wall - there isn't even a rest of the bike to go with it - and, moreover, it's in a pawn shop, which means you have to have money to get out, so in more ways than one this means of escape, too, is being blocked off. The two men the heroine goes after in this song both bear signs of espcape: money, in both cases; foreign-ness in the first; and the experiential escape of playing a video game in the second. So we know that she's willing to give up her body for that feeling of getting away. We also know, because this is specifically the song of the *shepherd's* dog, that running away would not be a good idea (hence the incredulous, "Whoever got that brave?"), which is reinforced hardcore in the last stanza: even though she's really opening up to these guys with a truck, they're "traitors" who are only after "her bullet hole" (three guesses as to what that symbolizes). Then she's visited by a vision of her future: a single mother "with a cross to bear" (which, actually, I don't think is being a single mother - I think it's being stuck in the same place she'd always been trying to escape). The waiter, the rooster, and the flea I think are all supposed to be instances of things that will generate that frustrated sense of predictability or inevitability that happens when you've been somewhere you don't want to be for a long time. I'm not really sure what to make of that "parking lot music" thing, though - is that just a shot at pop music and how idealized it can be sometimes? I dunno. |
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| Caribou – Desiree Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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You're missing the first two lines: You told me things would've changed But now we're back here again |
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| Caribou – Sandy Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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it starts, "Now I'm divided" ...more to come later when I get better ears... |
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| Iron & Wine – White Tooth Man Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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Note that a lot of the people have situations they don't like but that they don't really have the power to fix: the beauty queen, the kid with a crutch, the Indian chief, the wife who never wanted to be a wife, the witches (maybe also the postman). And, though the white-tooth man has problems of his own (he got cut up, the town ain't the same, his dog ran away) and even though he can't really fix his problems either, he's found another way out: doing whatever the hell he wants anyway. The comments to this point have been right on in pointing out the implications of this. I think dogs in this album are supposed to represent (some of?) the highest ideals we can aspire to: loyalty, self-sacrifice, courage, honesty (insofar as dogs have the opportunity to be honest), so their presence serves as a foil to the way that the people in these songs act - irresponsibly, violently, arrogantly, and, especially in this song, wantonly. Dogs are also very child-like in a way because they've become so dependent on humans for their survival, so the instances of dogs suffering are (at least partly) indictments of the way we act towards the ones who treat us best and who need us most. |
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| Iron & Wine – Resurrection Fern Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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I can offer an interpretation on one level, but there's probably a larger metaphorical meaning I'm missing. I think the main characters in this song are mourning something that they can't put behind them - probably the death of their child ("the baby's breath, our bravery wasted, and our shame"). It's not that they'll stop living their lives (they're still "pitching glass at cornfield crows and folding clothes"), but that for a while it'll just be going through the motions (living "like our ghosts will live"). But like the boys, they'll carry around the mementos of a meaningless and cruel tragedy around with them ("grandma's gun and the black bear claw that took her dog") and stare the tragedy in the face ("we'll see everything, in the timid shade of the autumn leaves and the buzzard's wing"; note the two signs of dying: autumn and a carrion bird). I think the chorus is supposed to evoke a lot of gut feeling: imagine that tight feeling in your gut, like your belly was wound up in wire, seeing yourself and someone you love as you really are (undressed), next to the unpoetic and uncaring evidence of something that used to be beautiful (the ashes of a fire). It's such a cold and sad image, but we're told that even though the two of them are out of reach (underwater), they're still beautiful (pearls), and one day they'll come back into themselves (like a resurrection fern that, though appearing to be dead, is just waiting for water). |
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| Iron & Wine – Peace Beneath the City Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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I think he's trying to draw an implied contrast between the peace beneath the city (i.e., six feet underground) and the strife within the city (where "city" may or may not mean an actual city). Notice also how the women in this song are all sort of secretive or private, always acting or outwardly displaying stereotypically shallow, "womanly" attitudes but secretly containing these noble, thoughtful hopes. I think this is supposed to reflect their inability to help or protect or at least talk some sense into the men around them. They know that something's wrong, hence the plaintative "give me"s, but they also know they don't have the power to fix it. (someone help me with this next part, it doesn't seem right yet) I think the Japanese cars are supposed to reflect a disillusionment with American ways of thinking - cars in particular have a strong American history, but recently everyone else has passed the U.S. up, so I think "give me a Japanese car" is another way of saying "give me something American that doesn't come from the same mental processes that make the death of my sons/brothers/husbands the only way for them to find peace." |
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