| Beach House – Zebra Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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It seems to be about that person you watch from the corner of your eye. Perhaps you don't know them, but you've always been intrigued. They seem melancholy or untouchable or altogether alien to you. But there's also this elusive beauty in them. Achingly so. Perhaps they aren't even aware of it themselves, and are deceiving themselves as seeing themselves as ordinary. In admiring said person's beauty, you in turn see yourself as an ordinary horse while this exotic creature arches before you. Unaware, you are the zebra the same as they are the zebra. The tragedy is that we can't see the exquisite qualities we possess without comparing their worth or unworthiness in relation to others. That's what it is for me. |
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| Tori Amos – Edge of the Moon Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| or Lucien, who is a character in Gaiman's Sandman. | |
| Tori Amos – Edge of the Moon Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| If it is indeed "Lucy inside of my soul", perhaps she's making reference to E.M. Forsters "A Room with A View", and his heroine Lucy Honeychurch who ventures from England to Italy. | |
| Tori Amos – Edge of the Moon Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| I could be wrong, but I thought it was "as primitive gods, you can stir the embers in the Lucian side of my soul." | |
| Kate Bush – This Woman's Work Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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For me, this song is about the transference of love. It reminds me of George Eliot's novel "Silas Marner". In the book, Silas looses all his gold which he thought he loved more than anything else in the world. A little girl with golden locks wanders mysteriously into his life, and that emptiness is eventually filled with an enormous force of love for this child. Though the song is not necessarily from a miser-turned-heart-of-gold perspective, I think it has to do with the way love gets redistributed once you've lost something or someone you valued dearly. That love doesn't evaporate. It evolves. It moves. It goes someplace else--"Now starts the craft of the father...". |
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| Kate Bush – Mother Stands for Comfort Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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I strongly feel Kate's music is meant to be "read too much into". It's what makes it rich, invigorating, timeless. After all, "Hounds of Love" is the mother of all pop concept albums. |
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| Kate Bush – Mother Stands for Comfort Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| I always thought it was poignant how "Mother Stands for Comfort", and the following song "Cloudbusting", are thematically very similar. Both songs deal with the way people, particularly family, defend each other against the persecution of society. There is an element of blindness when it comes to protecting a person we love. Kate is conflicted in this song about the balance that is upset by a destructive force, and the instinct to hide what is destructive in ourselves and in the ones we love. How do we come to terms with the duality and moral ambiguity within ourselves, much less the world at large? | |
| Joanna Newsom – Baby Birch Lyrics | 14 years ago |
| Interpretation of a song or thesis paper? ;) | |
| Tori Amos – Gold Dust Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I think Tori states it beautiful herself: "Gold Dust is very much about being other people and feeling how they feel. And feeling how you felt in another time, when you've been in another place. And it really isn't your past because somehow these frames are written on your body and they've made you what you are. Nothing is gone, it's just on your body map. And this project has been very much about finding my - i guess, my body map. I think if you're going to really write a work about a road trip and about America and who she is, then you have to go see her in all her glory and all her (laughs) bad fast food joints and good truck stops and everything in between. You know, you can't just go to the coast and then fly, do the fly over country trip. You really have to experience it. And the crazy thing about it is, the gold that we found - you find it so much when you're not even...thinking that you're in it. You turn around and see this pair of eyes and somebody puts a bowl of chili in front of you and it's heaven. It doesn't get any better than that." -- Scarlet Stories CD I don't like these definitive statements when people say "this song is NOT about regret, or nostalgia, or death, etc., etc. I think Tori herself would agree that her music tends to be very open ended--both lyrically and musically. She's also stated many times that the "clues are in the music". I love the idea that she has embedded little clues, but that she still realizes that each person will extract something different after listening to the song. For me, this song is inseparable from the memory of a friend who died at the age of 17. He was such a sweet soul. He died in a car accident on an icy road one evening. I've kept growing up. I'm in my mid twenties now and I've changed quite a lot. He's still there, though--in that place and with that innocent smile. He cannot change anymore. So for me, when I hear these lyrics mixed with the music it brings him back to me somehow... and it brings me back to who I was when I new him: both on the brink of graduating... sitting together in the woods outside our school when we should have in class. |
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| Tori Amos – Gold Dust Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I think Tori states it beautiful herself: "Gold Dust is very much about being other people and feeling how they feel. And feeling how you felt in another time, when you've been in another place. And it really isn't your past because somehow these frames are written on your body and they've made you what you are. Nothing is gone, it's just on your body map. And this project has been very much about finding my - i guess, my body map. I think if you're going to really write a work about a road trip and about America and who she is, then you have to go see her in all her glory and all her (laughs) bad fast food joints and good truck stops and everything in between. You know, you can't just go to the coast and then fly, do the fly over country trip. You really have to experience it. And the crazy thing about it is, the gold that we found - you find it so much when you're not even...thinking that you're in it. You turn around and see this pair of eyes and somebody puts a bowl of chili in front of you and it's heaven. It doesn't get any better than that." -- Scarlet Stories CD I don't like these definitive statements when people say "this song is NOT about regret, or nostalgia, or death, etc., etc. I think Tori herself would agree that her music tends to be very open ended--both lyrically and musically. She's also stated many times that the "clues are in the music". I love the idea that she has embedded little clues, but that she still realizes that each person will extract something different after listening to the song. For me, this song is inseparable from the memory of a friend who died at the age of 17. He was such a sweet soul. He died in a car accident on an icy road one evening. I've kept growing up. I'm in my mid twenties now and I've changed quite a lot. He's still there, though--in that place and with that innocent smile. He cannot change anymore. So for me, when I hear these lyrics mixed with the music it brings him back to me somehow... and it brings me back to who I was when I new him: both on the brink of graduating... sitting together in the woods outside our school when we should have in class. |
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| PJ Harvey – White Chalk Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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First off, I also thought indiaa's interpretation was lovely. This song is wonderful because it has plenty of room for personal interpretation. While it may be a straightforward narrative of PJ or one of her many alter-egos walking the English coast, I think this song has more windows than this one particular view offers. For me, it's about the body being both inseparable and yet estranged from history and place. The body is eternally earthbound, but in our dreams or spirit (unborn child) we can momentarily rise above it all. It is also about how the land itself eventually claims our bodies, yet we are free to wander its surface in between birth and death. When I close my eyes and listen to this song, I can see the crashing waves and the wind beaten paths along the coast. It reminds me of a Virginia Woolf novel, like The Waves or To The Lighthouse. |
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| Rufus Wainwright – Memphis Skyline Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Wainwright's weaving the myth of Orpheus's attempt to redeem his bride Eurydice from the Underworld with the tragic drowning of Jeff Buckley is one of the saddest and beautiful moments in contemporary music. In the myth, Orpheus's wife dies. However, he could play his lyre so sweetly that it even melted the heart of Hades himself. Hades agreed to release Eurydice back into the living world with her beloved husband on one condition--that Orpheus walks ahead of her and both do not look back until they've reached the world above. In his nervous excitement, Orpheus looks back just as his feet touch the mortal earth, and Eurydice vanishes back into Hades forever. This must be why Rufus sings "turn back" twice during his song. I think it's a song about many things--desire, jealousy, adoration. But I think, on a more elemental level, it's also about letting a person be dead. The water imagery flows in from both Greek myth and from Shakespeare's "Hamlet". Orpheus's own death was tragic, being torn apart by Maenads (female servants of Dionysius) while minding his own business at an oracle. They lopped off his head and sent it floating down the river along with his lyre. In "Hamlet", Ophelia drowns herself from apparent madness over the murder of her father by Hamlet, coupled with the denouncement of their relationship ("get thee to a nunnery") by Hamlet himself. I think it's one of his best. |
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