This is a hauntingly beautiful song about introspection, specifically about looking back at a relationship that started bad and ended so poorly, that the narrator wants to go back to the very beginning and tell himself to not even travel down that road. I believe that the relationship started poorly because of the lines:
"Take me back to the night we met:When the night was full of terrors: And your eyes were filled with tears: When you had not touched me yet"
So, the first night was not a great start, but the narrator pursued the relationship and eventually both overcame the rough start to fall in love with each other:
"I had all and then most of you"
Like many relationships that turn sour, it was not a quick decline, but a gradual one where the narrator and their partner fall out of love and gradually grow apart
"Some and now none of you"
Losing someone who was once everything in your world, who you could confide in, tell your secrets to, share all the most intimate parts of your life, to being strangers with that person is probably one of the most painful experiences a person can go through. So Painful, the narrator wants to go back in time and tell himself to not even pursue the relationship.
This was the perfect song for "13 Reasons Why"
All at sea again
And now my hurricanes
Have brought down
This ocean rain
To bathe me again
My ship's a sail
Can you hear its tender frame
Screaming from beneath the waves
Screaming from beneath the waves
All hands on deck at dawn
Sailing to sadder shores
Your port in my heavy storms
Harbours the blackest thoughts
I'm at sea again
And now your hurricanes
Have brought down
This ocean rain
To bathe me again
My ship's a sail
Can you hear its tender frame
Screaming from beneath the waves
Screaming from beneath the waves
All hands on deck at dawn
Sailing to sadder shores
Your port in my heavy storms
Harbours the blackest thoughts
All hands on deck at dawn
Sailing to sadder shores
Your port in my heavy storms
Harbours the blackest thoughts
All at sea again
And now my hurricanes
Have brought down
This ocean rain
To bathe me again
My ship's a sail
Hear its tender frame
Screaming from beneath the waves
Screaming from beneath your waves
Screaming from beneath the waves
Screaming from beneath the waves
All hands on deck at dawn
Sailing to sadder shores
Your port in my heavy storms
Harbours the blackest thoughts
And now my hurricanes
Have brought down
This ocean rain
To bathe me again
My ship's a sail
Can you hear its tender frame
Screaming from beneath the waves
Screaming from beneath the waves
All hands on deck at dawn
Sailing to sadder shores
Your port in my heavy storms
Harbours the blackest thoughts
I'm at sea again
And now your hurricanes
Have brought down
This ocean rain
To bathe me again
My ship's a sail
Can you hear its tender frame
Screaming from beneath the waves
Screaming from beneath the waves
All hands on deck at dawn
Sailing to sadder shores
Your port in my heavy storms
Harbours the blackest thoughts
All hands on deck at dawn
Sailing to sadder shores
Your port in my heavy storms
Harbours the blackest thoughts
All at sea again
And now my hurricanes
Have brought down
This ocean rain
To bathe me again
My ship's a sail
Hear its tender frame
Screaming from beneath the waves
Screaming from beneath your waves
Screaming from beneath the waves
Screaming from beneath the waves
All hands on deck at dawn
Sailing to sadder shores
Your port in my heavy storms
Harbours the blackest thoughts
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The Night We Met
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Mountain Song
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Jane's Addiction vocalist Perry Farrell gives Adam Reader some heartfelt insight into Jane’s Addiction's hard rock manifesto "Mountain Song", which was the second single from their revolutionary album Nothing's Shocking. Mountain song was first recorded in 1986 and appeared on the soundtrack to the film Dudes starring Jon Cryer. The version on Nothing's Shocking was re-recorded in 1988.
"'Mountain Song' was actually about... I hate to say it but... drugs. Climbing this mountain and getting as high as you can, and then coming down that mountain," reveals Farrell. "What it feels to descend from the mountain top... not easy at all. The ascension is tough but exhilarating. Getting down is... it's a real bummer. Drugs is not for everybody obviously. For me, I wanted to experience the heights, and the lows come along with it."
"There's a part - 'Cash in now honey, cash in Miss Smith.' Miss Smith is my Mother; our last name was Smith. Cashing in when she cashed in her life. So... she decided that, to her... at that time, she was desperate. Life wasn't worth it for her, that was her opinion. Some people think, never take your life, and some people find that their life isn't worth living. She was in love with my Dad, and my Dad was not faithful to her, and it broke her heart. She was very desperate and she did something that I know she regrets."
When We Were Young
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Plastic Bag
Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran
“Plastic Bag” is a song about searching for an escape from personal problems and hoping to find it in the lively atmosphere of a Saturday night party. Ed Sheeran tells the story of his friend and the myriad of troubles he is going through. Unable to find any solutions, this friend seeks a last resort in a party and the vanity that comes with it.
“I overthink and have trouble sleepin’ / All purpose gone and don’t have a reason / And there’s no doctor to stop this bleedin’ / So I left home and jumped in the deep end,” Ed Sheeran sings in verse one. He continues by adding that this person is feeling the weight of having disappointed his father and doesn’t have any friends to rely on in this difficult moment. In the second verse, Ed sings about the role of grief in his friend’s plight and his dwindling faith in prayer. “Saturday night is givin’ me a reason to rely on the strobe lights / The lifeline of a promise in a shot glass, and I’ll take that / If you’re givin’ out love from a plastic bag,” Ed sings on the chorus, as his friend turns to new vices in hopes of feeling better.
I agree with that latter sentence. This is my favourite song ever. The music, the build-up, the atmosphere, the lyrics, the fantastic outro with Ian's high vocals screaming out and howling to the moon... This is one of the very few songs that has reached perfection. The highlight of every EATB concert. The song is about letting go of dreams I think, regardless of what the dream is (he uses a lost romance in the song, but I think you can easily use the lyric and its sentiment in a different situation as well, the general mood is just disillusionment and letting go of dreams). Ian uses nautical terms to express the sentiments: the rain to wash away the pain, whereas the sea and the storm are representing the sadness in his words. "Your port in my heavy storm harbours the blackest thoughts" - must be one of the darkest lines ever written. A fellow Bunnymen fan told me he considered this a funeral song, and I do agree: a funeral for a lost dream. At the same time, despite the depressed undertone, the song is deeply romantic and the ideal song to hold your girlfriend in your arms and fall asleep together while listening to the music. The song is romantic yet depressed at the same time, but both sides feel so honest. World class song. Who dares to say that the Beatles are the best thing ever from Liverpool, deserves a slap. McCartney and Lennon never managed to write anything that comes close to this.
This could all be about a breakup, but I'm drawn to a different interpretation. Amazing imagery, and the interchanging of pronouns ("all" "I'm" "my" "your") in otherwise identical verses makes it feel very dream like. "MY tender frame" screaming from beneath "the (or your) waves" exhibits an intense emotional need, like a newborn wailing when separated from it's mother, needing to be heard but feeling muted. Leaving "your" port, which harbors "the blackest thoughts", for "sadder shores" feels very twisted, like he's escaping to upgrade his world to sadness, from something much darker.
It presents his varied mental states (all hands on deck) relating to one another in his head. For example, he may be ruminating on some public humiliation he endured (blackest thoughts), so distracting himself with sad songs may transition him away from that anxiety to a more palatable place (sadder shores). Meanwhile, beneath the anxiety and depression, his true identity (tender frame) is screaming to be nourished. He's stuck under water, under the noise. The emotional rhythms of anxiety and depression won't allow his purest self to flourish.
Smells like the ocean, tastes salty, feels misty.... sounds soothing!
The second paragraph really resonated with me... about a public humiliation, in which I can relate to in the substance (regarding the second paragraph)
My take of this gorgeously crafted song is of a flaw that one knowingly has in life, and carries that flaw into certain situations that are deemed a failure due to this inseparable weight carried. I feel like this song can be taken many ways, but what I get from it is of a relationship that was ended too soon due to one person's failure to evade this flaw. The "hurricanes" referred to are the personal flaws in cognizance of the troubled one. The person understands that a predicament is underway if the path to a relationship is followed, but he feels no choice to undergo this same route to save his sanity and sense of self worth. "And now my hurricanes have brought down this ocean rain To bathe me again." The individual is bathed again in grief that was perceptively unavoidable given prior attempts at pursuing relationships.
Being in the sea can be metaphorical for experiencing a relationship once more, and the impending sadness that will result.
"Screaming from beneath the waves" can be the internal acknowledgment of this flaw, in full realization that this error is inescapable despite attempted mental refinement to avert this magnetized problem.
By far my favorite Bunnymen song. I think it's about being consumed by another and calling out as you're going down for the last time.
the song is a metaphor for a relationship. In this case, the ship is the narrator and the ocean is the other person (presumably the female). McCulloch is comparing the grueling hardships of a Christoper Columbus-like journey over the seas to a relatioship. The waves are the obstacles or the hardships that accompany any normal relationships; the ocean rain is the emotions that are stirred in relationships, basically representing tears. The narrator is essentialy "screaming from beneath the waves" of the other person to express all the sorrow that this other person has caused him to feel.
Basically this song's a comment on the powerful emotions that relationships can stir. McColluch makes this comment in a very poetic fashion, very Poe-like, or to a lesser extent, Wilde-like.
and that's why the bunnymen kick ass.
At the SXSW 2006 festival, cheeky old Ian McCulloch introduced this song by saying "Next we're going to play the most beautiful song ever written". Arrogant, yes, but I can't really argue the truth of that statement. One of the most perfect marriages of lyric to music ever.
I don't really have much of a clue as to what this song is about, but I really love it. maybe not my fav EATB song, but it's damn close. But I think this was the song when I first realized how good a singer McCulloch is. His writing is good too, but his singing is really his strong point. He may not have a great a range as some other people, but can vary his style very effecivly and pour emotion into just the right lines to give the song that extra burst without cheapening the lines he wants to emphasize by overdoing it in other places. Which is a shame in Siberia, because he's moved away from that (from what I've heard off it) but I guess it had to happen. Hopefully he'll be able to incorperate it into some of their stuff in the future. Everytime he does the "screaming from beneath the waves" live that last time I get chills. I saw them in concert a month or so ago, and it was really awesome. This was the last song, and he did a damn fine job of it.
This song is beautiful, so soft and somber, yet dark and moody at the same time. The chorus is brilliant, even though I'm not entirely sure what it means, it's a great sounding metaphor. Reminds me a bit of the Doors song The End, Ian sounds a lot like Jim Morrison in this one too.
Beautiful song! It doesn't get much better.
What a beautiful song!