| The Antlers – Wake Lyrics | 14 years ago |
| Every time this song gets to the last few lines, I start crying. I tried to help someone, but loving them with my whole heart wasn't enough to save them. I failed everyone. And as stupid as this might sound, the only time I feel really forgiven is listening to this song. | |
| The Antlers – Bear Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Everyone's need to take this song and this album so literally baffles me. A concept album is at its best (like here) when it intertwines stories and motifs to get at a deeper and more universal idea. The idea in Hospice is that sometimes love is not enough and that despite love, people can be unable to help each other - in fact, they can do enormous damage to one another. Yes, this song is using images of pregnancy and abortion. To me, this is a metaphor for what happens in a dangerously co-dependent relationship, where something dangerous and odd is created between two people that only they two are allowed to know and understand. This dark secret (a bear, a baby, an abortion, whatever) binds the two people together, even while their relationship is past recovery. As for the album as a whole, the same holds true. boniver (7/9/09 comment) said "Silberman conceived and wrote Hospice over the course of two years in his Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment, as a way to cope with the illness and death of someone who was close to him, but abusive." I have never heard that and I don't think it's true. Its true he wrote it over the course of two years in his apartment in Brooklyn as a way to cope with trauma, but I don't THINK that trauma was literally someone dying of cancer as in the album. The cancer is just one more example of how in life, sometimes love is not enough to save someone. Also, giving the abuser cancer is a way for Silberman to illustrate that this person doesn't act abusively because they are evil, they act that way because they are sick and terrified and physically and mentally messed up. Trying to make the song and album tell literal stories that can be "translated" insults and cheapens the Antlers' work, which is far more about feelings of helplessness, guilt and loss than about any particular plot and cast of characters. |
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