| Townes Van Zandt – Rex's Blues Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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Rex Bell, sometimes spelled "Wrecks" as a homophone for Rex, was a friend to Townes and an original partner of the Old Quarter. The lines of this song are pure poetry and can't be matched for meaning by any amount of verbosity. But I think, in essence, what Townes wanted to get across is a love of life coupled with a sense of the futility of life. That when the futility of life is not just accepted but embraced, and one lives for experience, that is the highest form of living. Initially the lines of this song are full of seeming contradictions in emotional contrasts: Ride the blue wind high and free she'll lead you down through misery leave you low come time to go alone and low as low can be But in the context of a full life, these contrasts aren't contradictions at all. Misery exists because it contrasts with "high and free", and vice versa, because "there ain't no dark 'til something shines". Life is becoming. Life is always needing or wanting more. And in the end life is death. "if it rained an ocean I'd drink it dry and lay me down dissatisfied" and "all born to grow and grown to die". Life is like a song, or a story, or a poem, in that there is always a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the ending, even just the fact of an ending, is vital. The song is about living a full life: beginning, middle, and end. It's about not sacrificing the direction of your story in an attempt to prolong the middle. |
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| Townes Van Zandt – Rake Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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It goes "I lived like a rake IN a young man". A rake is a debauched man(like adeyar wrote), an immoral person, commonly used to mean a male slut. In the beginning he's living this great nightlife and only having to deal with the consequences during the day: "The sun she would come and beat me back down but every cruel day had its nightfall I'd welcome the stars with wine and guitars full of fire and forgetful" He's young, lives in the moment, and he doesn't anticipate his lifestyle ever catching up with him. "And time was like water but I was the sea I'd have never noticed it passin' except for the turnin' of night into day and the turnin' of day into cursin'". Now he's old and feeble and young people are incredulous of his stories of debauchery. "You look at me now, and don't think I don't know what all your eyes are a sayin' Does he want us to believe these ravings and lies they're just tricks that his brains been a playin'? A lover of women he can't hardly stand he trembles he's bent and he's broken" He thought he would get away with it:"I was takin' my pride in the pleasures I'd known I laughed and SAID I'd be forgiven" and that at the worst he'd have to settle down someday. "but my laughter turned 'round eyes blazing and said my friend, we're holdin' a wedding". But it takes it's toll on his life because the consequences catch up to him:"I buried my face but it spoke once again, the night to the day we're a bindin' and now the dark air is like fire on my skin and even the moonlight is blinding". The marriage of night and day is the morphing of daily hangovers and nightly pleasures into a wholesale downgrading of his life. |
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| Bat for Lashes – Daniel Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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My ears mostly agree with your lyrics, especially "into a place that's LOST" I don't know why someone thought vast was right. I hear a few differences tho: "and under war blue skies"(doesn't sound like wild at all), "we would never be apart"(as opposed to "we'll" which is the contracted from of "we will"), "in THE gold n' blue" (sounds identical to golden-blue but makes more sense), "but in a goodbye BET" (as much as bed initially seems to make better sense, the "T" sound is unmistakably pronounced with emphasis. I take "goodbye bet" to mean a sort of planned break up. To me the song is clearly about wanting to return to an idyllic(at least in memory) past in which a lost lover resides. |
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