| Craig Finn – Balcony Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| The "SA" is a Super America gas station. Wondered about that for a couple years before I drove through Minneapolis one time and saw a sign. They got em everywhere up there. | |
| The Mountain Goats – Twin Human Highway Flares Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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"On the day that I forget you, I hope my heart explodes" That, and the similar sentiment from the end of the first verse, are (I would argue) appropriated from/references to Psalm 137: "If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you." Name me one songwriter who can use the bible like John Darnielle. God damn, that's a good line. |
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| The Mountain Goats – Yoga Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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There are two westerners in Bombay, lovers. They're in a lot of trouble and they know it. They're altering their passports in an attempt to escape from Bombay. Their enemies catch up with them (they were always going to--the end of verse one tells us that they kind of knew their desperate attempt was gonna fail) and poison the water, killing his girl/partner in crime. The end leaves open the possibility that he didn't drink the water or that he might still be able to escape without her. Or maybe he only has to be alone until he, too, is caught. The fact that they were altering their passports with scissors and do-it-yourself kits highlights the desperation of their situation, as does the fact that their plan, whatever it is, depends on a kerosene lamp which they aren't going to be able to replace. The lamp tells us that this is a night-time escape, and that the song probably (I think?) has a pre-modern setting. |
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| Bob Dylan – Tangled Up in Blue Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| Might Delacroix, then, be a reference to the poet Delacroix? | |
| The Mountain Goats – 1 Samuel 15:23 Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| I interpret it as like a Jim Jones mass suicide cult leader thing. Narrator's kind of demonic in some ways, "There are more like me where I come from," etc. Definitely a cult going on--self help tapes and homemade clothing? Come on. When he says "go down to the netherworld" it's like a creepy premonition--he asks them to drink the grape juice. | |
| Aesop Rock – None Shall Pass Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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At least 85% nonsense. "Rogue vocoder blitz"? About half of y'all seem to think it's some kind of commentary on the Bush administration, which is straight ridiculous. Bottom line, only three or four of the lines can conclusively be parsed in such a way that they have meaning, and the meanings don't actually correlate in any way whatsoever. Some nice imagery though. 8/10. |
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| Bob Dylan – Idiot Wind Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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Oh, and that interpretation is made clearer in the bootleg version "You didn't trust me for a minute, babe. I've never known the spring to turn So quickly into autumn." |
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| Bob Dylan – Idiot Wind Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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Basically, it chronicles a relationship; melancolley gets the gist of it. The part that most interests me is "The priest wore black on the seventh day and sat stone-faced while the building burned. I waited for you on the running boards, near the cypress trees, while the springtime turned slowly into autumn." Fantastic lines. I've spent a lot of time thinking about them. The conclusion I come to: The narrator gets "Groom's still standing at the altar"'d by the dark lady. They were supposed to marry (hence the priest) or run away together (hence the running board). Now, you'll notice that springtime turns directly into autumn. There's no summer. At the risk of reading too much into it- my belief is that this represents their relationship. It bloomed with spring and died with autumn directly thereafter; there was no fulfillment, no long and happy summer. It's bitter, like the song as a whole. |
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| Bob Dylan – Changing of the Guards Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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I don't agree with DJacques' interpretation. Dylan never, in my mind, goes for big, secret interpretations like that; he'd make it more obvious if he meant for us to read it like that. Personally, I see the song as a big ol' sprawling Dylanesque narrative, with all of the awesome apocalyptic imagery that that implies. I'll try to break it down without straying into any interpretations that are too questionable. I'm not wedded to the minutiae of this interpretation, but the overall gist of it is, in my mind, inarguably correct. The first verse implies some sort of battle- I see it as a war between sixteen powers that took sixteen years, but that's not necessarily the case. God is grieving, for his loss. The last two lines are posers- perhaps it's just imagery? Perhaps the battlefield dead are rising as angels? The second verse introduces the narrator ("Fortune calls" makes me think that he's a trickster-hero of some sort), and the ancient-times setting; there's a marketplace swarming with merchants and thieves, and then the narrator brings up with maddening brevity the lady of the piece- genre conventions give me the feeling that she's either his lover or one that he's in love with, but there's nothing in the song that really indicates this heavily. The narrator obviously knows her of old; I get the feeling that she's young, and the fantasy-feel of the song is reinforced by her portentous birth on midsummer's eve near a mysterious and important tower. In the third verse, "The Captain"- another character we know nothing about- is at a party of some sort, at night, with an ominous moon overhead. The captain is in love with a black girl- later verses tell us that she's a slave in the house outside of which the celebration is being held. I can imagine him drinking champagne and looking up nervously at the manor where she's working. They've talked before, and he thinks she'll come away with him. She won't. Now for verse #4. "They shaved her head" is an obvious reference to the practice of shaving the heads of African women brought as slaves to England/America in the early days of slavery. I'm assuming that the "her" in this verse is the ebony maid- if not, I don't know what to make of it. "She was torn between Jupiter and Apollo" is tricky, but I'm gonna chalk it up to random pagan imagery. A messenger arrives to summon the maid somewhere, and the narrator, struck by her beauty, follows (is this the sweet-smelling summer-born girl of the second verse? I doubt it; I think he's abandoned her in favor of the ebony maid). In the last line, I feel like there's something I'm not getting. Why are they lifting her veil? I really don't have a good guess. At any rate, the fifth verse finds the narrator washed up after a brief and torrential affair (the heart-shaped tattoo is new because of the stitches), presumably with "you." "You" is a third (or perhaps second) woman, whom the narrator met after or during the veil-lifting weirdness that went down during the celebration. Alternately, I can see "you" being the ebony maid; weird, but whatever. The flowers symbolize the narrator's relationship, and more fantasy stuff with renegade priests and treacherous young witches; "you" has pawned the tokens of his love and left him high and dry to flee the desolation of the land that the story has taken place in so far (riding past destruction in the ditches) Verse 6 takes us back to one of the women in question (I'm leaning towards the summer-born "she") or rather her bizarre, frightening, abandoned home (I doubt that the dog-soldiers and the palace of mirrors are literal things, but they don't represent, as far as I can tell, any one thing; it's an imagery thing). There are angels' voices and the whole shebang. Very fantastic. In verse 7, "she" (I think this one's the ebony maid, because of the "golden locks" thing- Bob's contrasting them with her shaved head, bringing up the interracial thing) wakes up "him" (the captain, in my book, he's the only third-person male character we have, and he loves the ebony maid. Might be a new guy). He's been sleeping for 48 hours after sweeping her off her feet, taking her away from the mansion where she languished, breaking her chains (metaphorical and perhaps, in this case, literal- she was, after all, presumably a slave) and bringing her to a remote, mountainous place (mountain laurel and rolling rocks) to make love, presumably with such passion that a 48-hour rest is necessitated. This is all standard romance-novel stuff; Bob's language makes it really elegant, though. She wants to know what they do next, now that the initial, romantic, grab-the-chick-and-go thing is over. He "pulls her down" and they have a "love is all we need" moment. After this, he goes back to "the man" in verse 8. Perhaps these men are her old masters? We know that the golden-haired lover (that is, the man we think is the captain) has been a faithful servant, a steward of sorts, accomplishing everything that these fatcats wanted him too, and pulling dirty tricks (marking cards) for them in the process. But now he's letting them know that the times they are a-changing and that their old world is rapidly fading (Eden is burning). Basically, the changing of the guard here is the climax of the song; the Captain says, rightly, that the old order is a thing of the past, and things are about to change; "they" can change with it or die. The ninth verse is the conclusion. The real action took place in between verses 8 and 9, and 9 is the aftermath. This reminds me a little of the final verse of "Black Diamond Bay" or something. Things are going to settle down, the eventual outcome is clear, and the "false idols" are coming down. Or maybe the verses each tell an individual story, and I'm clutching at straws to tie them together. Who knows. The only thing I know for sure is that Bob's not trying to communicate a secret meaning about something modern, but rather telling a story, disjointed and mysterious though it is, that's steeped in phantasmagoria and apocalyptic imagery. |
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| Bob Dylan – Jokerman Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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The theme of Jokerman is the classic “trickster-hero” theme found in many folk-tales and myths. The hero of Jokerman is Jokerman, a visionary in a broken world. You know that he's a hero from the lines “distant ships sailing into the mist, / you were born with a snake in both of your fists, / while a hurricane was blowing.” This line shows the awe inspired by Jokerman; if he was indeed born in such a way, then is he not magnificent, set apart from the crowd? Jokerman is “a friend to the martyr, a friend to the woman of shame.” This line shows you that he's a people's man, a Robin-hood figure. Jokerman is mysterious too, but also awe-inspiring. Dylan says of him “In the smoke of the twilight, on a milk-white steed, Michelangelo indeed could’ve carved out your features”. One assumes that only a truly magnificent visage would have been worthy of Michelangelo's attentions, and “the smoke of the twilight” sounds extremely mysterious and shadowy. Dylan says to him “You’re a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds, manipulator of crowds, you’re a dream twister”. Such a man, with such powers and talents, can only achieve greatness. Dylan Himself? Perhaps. Satan? It's entirely possible. God? It strikes me as unlikely. Ronald Reagan? Lol, you kids. I think the answer might very well be all of the above. I'm not saying that everyone should interpret the song their own way, or that all interpretations are equally valid, but Dylan may not have written the song with a specific entity or idea in mind- maybe he made the persona of Jokerman one-size-fits-all for a reason. Or maybe the mouth organ was only ever a mouth organ. I think it totally possible that Jokerman is just a creation of Dylan's. |
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