| Dexys Midnight Runners – Come On Eileen Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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According to some sources, the name "Eileen" means "desired". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eileen |
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| Live – Face and Ghost (The Children's Song) Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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"Growing up," in the sense of no longer being a little kid, is a tangential aspect of the larger phenomenon this song is about. Consider the lines: "You got it bad; You got it good. You saw the sun Like you knew that you would. We gotta make this better, Gotta make this right. Ain't no peace in the valley baby 'Til the darkness turns to light." The subject is in a difficult but nonetheless good situation, because he "saw the sun." "Sun"/"son" is a pun used throughout this album with several layers of meaning, one of which is "Jesus" (as in the son of God, the light of truth). This song depicts the continuing struggle that begins in the song "Voodoo Lady" and recurs in "Where Fishes Go" and "Feel the Quiet River Rage," the internal struggle of whether or not the person should choose to accept his newly discovered spirituality or remain concerned only with the material world. The internal nature of the conflict going on in the fellow's head leads me to think of this as a song where he's talking to himself. However, I think there's an intentional double-meaning where the person saying "you got it bad lover" etc. could be understood to be Ed's lover talking to him, because we learn elsewhere that it is through this love that he has found Jesus/spirituality, so to speak. But it's not easy to accept a life of spiritual love. It is painful, challenging, frightening, and a lot of work. But more importantly than all that, it requires that you abandon your own self and surrender your will to love/Jesus. This "dying to yourself" is why people call themselves "born again" Christians -- their own selves have died, and a new self is born who is controlled by Jesus (Live would refer to this person as "the one" or something else less specific). This is where we get "the face of one ravaged by love," and this is why "it's both dead and alive." It is, to quote Paul, "dead to the flesh" ("flesh" not meaning sex, but rather the physical world) but alive in Christ (Ed's new-found spirituality). The lyrics about children and nature build other layers of meaning on top of this starting point. The juxtaposition in the lines "can you hear that children's song?/ can you take me to that place?/ do you hear that pilgrim's song?/ can you take me there?" suggest Ed is implying a parallel or similarity between being childlike and being a pilgrim (seeker of God). Jesus certainly did tell people to have the faith of a child. |
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| Live – Meltdown Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| No physical pain compares to spiritual emptiness. But he has found the "one" who can bring warmth again to his heart. | |
| Live – They Stood Up For Love Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| Also consider the musical climax of the song, where Ed laments that we made it to the moon but we can't make it home in a raging crescendo (I haven't heard the acoustic but I don't know how well this would work in that version) that suddenly drops away to a peaceful revelation that we already are home if only we surrender to love, i.e. wherever we are (in the broad sense) we can be at peace, if only we can understand how to get through "the distance to here" (the title of the album). | |
| Live – They Stood Up For Love Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| In that last sentence, it should be "NOT know all this," not "NOW know all this." | |
| Live – They Stood Up For Love Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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The phrase "simple as that" doesn't describe any Live song I've ever heard. As katerxdaisy points out, this song is a continuing consideration of the philosophical question of whether there's more to existence than physical reality, a question at the heart of the album _The Distance to Here_. The description of "naked lovers" recalls the opening of the album, "The Dolphin's Cry." Ed then transitions through the observation that however we might physically describe reality, there's no denying the power of the intangible, of love, something you can't measure like you can a nerve impulse. Furthermore, it is scientific fact that everything *is* light (literally true, e = mc^2), existing eternally. This transcendence transitions to the transcendent nature of Jesus (love personified) himself, appearing in the "masters in everytime, lords in everyplace: those who stood up for love down in spite of the hate." All this is why he gives his heart and soul to the one, as those others have done before him. Musically this determination to give himself to love/Jesus is contrasted with the directionless despair of what it's like to now know all this, to go out of your mind looking back to your birth and forward to your demise, seeing nothing in your life but a physical lifespan and then a meaningless end. |
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| Live – We Walk In The Dream Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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I like jk's observations regarding "I Alone." Indeed, although I don't see the whole _Distance_ album as an apology, I definitely agree that this song represents an apology (it might be appropriate to call it a repentence), or at least an admission of being way wrong. It starts and ends with Ed saying he was wrong, and interestingly at the end of the song he doesn't really sing those lines so much as just speak them. As for "recycled" lyrics, this song contains a lot of resolution of a lot of the images used throughout this album. In many ways it ties up the loose ends created by the conflicts underlying all the preceding songs in the album (the one song that follows this one portrays a place where the conflicts are in the past). Most of the songs in this album are second-rate music except in the context of the whole album, in which context they become amazing. Here in this song Ed has an answer to his question in track 2, "The Distance," "are we locked into these bodies? are we anything at all?" Well, now he knows "we are not these bodies alone." Here he has transcended the dream-state blindness that kept him from seeing the magic and meaning in the world around him. Here he knows that there's "something more": "to live a life in love." This is not just romantically "in love," but being "reborn in love" in the Christian sense. Which is why we see that he is "tethered and tied to the heart of the one," a clear depiction of dying to oneself and being reborn in Christ as Paul describes it in the book of Romans (this book along with Jesus's espousing of the Golden Rule became the metaphysical/theological basis for Christian spirituality). Having given up his own will in this way, he can now say that "I feel strong,/ I'm finally at peace,/ The war is all gone," but "by no cause of my own." He is like the eagle who cuts through the air, with "no time for fear,/ faith in his wings takes him there." |
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| Live – Voodoo Lady Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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Yeah, it really is a great lyric. It sort of summarizes much of the conflict the speaker experiences in this song, as well as in "Where Fishes Go," "Face and Ghost," and "Feel the Quiet River Rage." Specifically, a mixture of apathy and fear at the prospect of actually comitting himself to love. In this song he is being seduced by apathy. The Voodoo lady tells him: "calm the fuck down you got a serious side to you that could give the whole world a frown now nothin' really matters to me you see check out these holes in my gown let your eyes lose their focus a little let your guard come down" He puts off the decision to choose "water" (life, spirit) or "blood" (spiritless flesh, death) by deciding that neither is really his "style." But fundamental metaphysical matters of how you look at life and how you live are not matters where you'd say "Eh, that's not really my style." |
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| Live – The Dolphin's Cry Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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Consider the chorus: "Love will lead us, alright Love will lead us, she will lead us Can you hear the dolphin's cry? See the road rise up to meet us It's in the air we breathe tonight Love will lead us, she will lead us" It's not coincidence that this song is the lead track of the album _The Distance to Here_. This song stands as a simple, personal narrative that summarizes the overarching theme of the entire album: the miracle of love is available to us all, right here and now, if you can only smell it in the air we breathe tonight, hear it in the beauty of the dolphin's cry, see it in the people around you. Love personified (for Ed, personified as "she") can lead us through our lives if we will let it. This song introduces much of the album's recurring imagery, for example breathing and dreams, which only make sense in the context of the other songs of the album. Another image introduced here is distance, which we might call the "title image" of the album (_The Distance to Here_). It is alluded to when the speaker asks "Did we leave this place?" By "this place" he is referring literally to the location where they had sex, but more broadly he is referring to the spiritual place they are in when they are together. His uncertainty expressed in this line hints at the ultimate message of the album and this song, that we are always in a place where spiritual fulfillment is accessible, we just have to be able to see it, to let love lead us and show us the road that will rise up to meet us. |
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| Live – The Distance Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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The interesting thing about this album is how at least half the songs can stand alone as summaries of the whole album, made from different perspectives. As this is the album's title track, it's no surprise when that happens here. The unique take of this song is that it's sort of an invokation of the muse at the opening of the album (the first three lines), after which the problem and approach are laid out in relatively simple terms (for a Live song): 'I've gone to church, I've said my prayers, but I still feel empty. I don't feel there's anything more to my life than what I see in the physical world. But then I found something else... maybe I already have access to the "something sweeter" I'm seeking...' Musically, the song builds tension and expectation, leaving us ready to hear in the rest of the album a detailed account of the resolution of the problem this song presents. Notice that verse 2 ends with us learning that he's had a vision, but we don't get to find out what he learned from the vision. The speaker's dilemma returns in the chorus, but there is more resolve/hope that he will find an answer... or maybe he already has one? After the chorus, he sings a shortened 2-line verse, "this distance is dreaming,/ we're already there tonight." If this song is a linear narrative, then the rest of the album occurs during the second chorus and is obscured by it, and the last half-verse is cryptic precisely because the words it uses to explain the resolution to the song's previous dilemma are not explained in this song, but elsewhere. "Dream" is a sort of illusion or blindness -- so he has realized that the distance doesn't really exist, except as the very blindness that keeps you from seeing that there is no distance. We are already there (in a place offering spiritual fulfillment). |
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| Live – Sun Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| Well, lacking in lots of the other songs on this album, but not lacking in their other albums, actually. | |
| Live – Sun Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| Well it is one of the more lucid Live songs. What's to say that isn't fairly evident? In this song the speaker embraces fate and love. Musically this song carries a sense of adventure lacking in most of Live's other work. | |
| Live – Sparkle Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| I'd also add, just as a small aside, that it's interesting how the "someone" calls the speaker "son," because this is a word that recurs in this album as a name for Jesus (as in, like, the son of God). It reinforces the song's message that all of us, hookers and soldiers and swine and would-be saints, carry the potential to give love like Jesus did. | |
| Live – Sparkle Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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"the giver became the gift, all one" = Jesus Jesus gave himself as the gift of salvation to humanity. "One" is a recurring name throughout the album to refer to Jesus. But of course the great thing about Live is it isn't that simple. We are never meant to see Jesus as the only personification of that kind of powerful spiritual love/giving. After all, the only thing the speaker seems to know for sure is that "someone" moved him, and what does it matter what we call this someone? After all, it would be a waste of time to dwell on such useless religious conventions as waiting for seas to part of messiahs to come. (See for example also most of the rest of this album, or "She" from _Birds of Prey_.) It makes perfect sense to translate this song's sentiment into marriage or a hundred other occasions of spiritual giving of love, which is really the whole point of the song (and the album) -- the miracle of love can be an everyday thing if you open yourself to it. |
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| Live – Pillar Of Davidson Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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Consider this stanza: "The shepherd won't leave me alone, He's in my face and I... The shepherd of my days, And I want you here by my heart and my head -- I can't start till I'm dead." It would be quite out of place for there to be a shephard in a song that's only about a motorcycle factory, especially if it's about the drudgery of factory work. A shephard is a common metaphor for Jesus, which then makes sense when the speaker wants him by his heart and his head. He can't start 'till he's dead? That's the basic Christian notion of "dying to oneself" and being reborn in Christ. He can't start letting Jesus into his heart and mind until his own will has died and so can be replaced by that of Jesus (refer to Romans). And, as tomtoro notes, the song's title is a strong image of Jesus as well. |
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