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There are barn doors
And there are revolving doors
Doors on the rudders of big ships
We are revolving doors
There are doors that open by themselves
There are sliding doors
And there are secret doors
There are doors that lock
And doors that don't
There are doors that let you in
And out
But never open
But they are trapdoors
That you can't come back from
And there are revolving doors
Doors on the rudders of big ships
We are revolving doors
There are doors that open by themselves
There are sliding doors
And there are secret doors
There are doors that lock
And doors that don't
There are doors that let you in
And out
But never open
But they are trapdoors
That you can't come back from
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I wanna focus on the music and that. There's that constantly cycling drum beat, and every 20 seconds it repeats a little more noticeably. Like deja-vu. And those parts where the music goes into trippy spirals, it's like the interesting and dramatic parts of life that interrupt the grinding cycle of day. This could focus on one person, or maybe society as a whole. The trapdoors part could be a bad choice by someone that didn't seem too big, then cascaded into a huge disaster, on an apocalyptic scale. That would be why it goes all spooky at the end. The cycle of life, coming to an end. Maybe.
On another note, this is what I was listening to while walking alone in the woods, at night, without a flash light, when I spotted the sillouetted form of a large seemingly ownerless dog on the path ahead of me.
This song is nothing but good memories for me.
Also, it is about different sorts of doors, and how can you go wrong with that?
mm, per da inter views the following had a deep and long fear of hell in youth: Kurt Cobain, Elliott Smith and Thom Yorke. Yes, that was what he was talking about. Is true my re-productive friends and sometime readers of Thibetan Book o' Dead? that book did it in for two o' them (not Steve) ...all about what moves about and happens after dying and before coming back and back and back into Door B (the big Bet) of Alpha-Bet town: 'the bitch burning on a shining sheet, the only maker that you want or knew that will take you out from an open door' - Elliott Smith.
See, about the time after OK Computer both the lead singer of the Verve and Thom Yorke were off on their own just wandering around the countryside trying to get their heads on straight and change them selves and were practicing meditation and were contacted it would appear by men of the field, 'Talent' agents. Thom wasn't even sure if he could sing anymore. And then perhaps, at least so far as the Former is concerned, they experienced what it is like to have an A.B. and what it's like not to have one upon dying. That's what this song is about, and I don't mean personality type. What is left, what happens to such upon death with all the corridors out there in the 'Here' (/after)? Trust me Thom makes fun of even semi-nobles like Coldplay and won't even give them an audience as they request of him because they sing what he calls 'lifestyle' music, stuff just about lifes quaint little experiences, so it's not about that (again, check out the inter views where he says what he thinks about lifestyle music and the horror he experienced upon trying meditating). Thom, rather, is much more interested in a persons death-style, dying to one's ego and seeing what is beyond the localized ego:
"Pulk: A small sled, used for man-hauling supplies across snow and ice" - first Dictionary entry you see upon googling the word.
Man-hauling, hah.. : ( .... get it my little ones? : (
'heres a truck stop instead of St. Peter,' 'and you want to bridge the schism, the built in mechanism to protect you.' - Rapid Eye Movement/R.E.M....Amnesiac....Rapid Eye Movement....Amnesiac
'moving sidewalks, great opportunity: blinks' - R.E.M.
'letting the days go by, water moving underground, same as it ever was, and the moon, the moon: ...here comes the twister.' - Talking Heads ...revolving doors
....now what is this mechanism/door to protect you from knowing you're just food for the moon, going out the barn door?..What could I be saying, eh? I must be raving to think it's plain as a barn door. I brush the cobwebs of the sky, I sucked the moon, I spoke too soon, and how much did it cost? Astral fall, moonbeams and sail on shooting stars...I must be imagining and not very precedent, this jibe I'm jiving at. Well, you may be young and precedent but no right from wrong. Know right from wrong, or in a flood you'll build an ark and sail us to the moon...because the sky turns grey from where *I am* and you begin. I am up in the clouds? I am up in the clouds in a catacomb/and I can't, you know, come down. I go watch it all take part where I am and where you start and you, YOU LEFT ME ALONE...your voices raffling around my windowsill, yesterday's heavens are blown by the wind, yesterdays people are in a home scatterbrained and uh, any fool can easily pick up...and I only wish I could follow: a moving target in a firing range (planetary processes/influences we are just lubrication cells on moving sidewalks for the mercilessness of...taking us places we don't want to go after death, some are even dead before death frankly) ..broken branches trip me as I speak? just cause you feel it doesn't mean it's there (samsara), someone ought to show you the way...you're so greedy and lonely: we are accidents waiting to happen...
Amnesiac's: Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors [a perfect encapsulation of the landsape of the real here/after]
There are Barn Doors
and there are Evolving Doors
[listen close, that is what he enunciates. He is speaking of the few who get out/wake up. see there are snakes and there are ladders]
doors on the rudders of big ships
[we are doors fed to the moon and the planets in this solar system (this ship) unless we evolve inside before death like doors on a rudder to the bigger Ship above this one of our solar system using us like tools]
and they are revolving doors
[reincarnation/reoccurence here on earth *is* hell minor and most are stuck in this until they enter a state of permanent de ja vue in one of their reoccurences here, spiralling/spiriting out, as perhaps Thom is now approaching but very, very few you see around here are going through...especially recently, no initiates left hardly. And fundamentalists (scientism/religious = same crap) are ignorant, very few go to the dissolutive psychic suffering of the lower cellular/mineral world, 'Hell Major,' and that's it, that sociopaths substances must endure seemingly endless cycles in and that Thom will speak of momentarily...trap doors down to the dust bin]
there are doors that open by themselves
[ie. open whether you planned on them or not and that take you somewhere else: death a la physical, the lesser death. This is not the second death that happens among initiates: psychological death to this life of temporal materiality while still physically in the body. Only those who conquer the second death will not have to 'go out' anymore according to the book of Revelation for all you 'people of the book.']
there are sliding doors...and there are secret doors
[there are ways to die to your ego/outward false personality (that you experience the horrid, torpid falsity of when you take hallucinogenics perhaps but that elevated people experience the sham of all the time). There is a way to evolve psychologically out of the planet of the apes here: sliding doors in us, secret doors...centers no longer stealing and usurping in us dissipating us into caricature...vast]
there are doors that lock...and doors let down
[the key is to hermetically seal yourself and open oneself to higher centers trying to break through all the time in one... letting down the door of the loft. Also I think he is speaking of certain people, as someone in a previous post here correctly remarked, who are like locked doors to other humans, doors that just let them and those around them down into dark places. they die of psychological chances in this life even before physical death because of their sadistic empty opportunism in them, the living dead....even the earliest known book of man we have found yet, Epic of Gilgamesh, speaks of such 'vampires' among the Rushes/us people. You can't imagine how many are secretly led by them.]
there are doors that let you in and out...but never open
[the astral sound made right after he says this is an indicator so you can get what he is saying. this is the development of A.B..anyone who has begun to taste it has heard this exact sound. Even someone like Art Bell on Coast to Coast radio show (most listened to show on radio at night on earth) has experienced this sound and out of body experience. it is just a beginning. See things can happen in one before the door of death opens, doors that let you in and out in this very physical life's door. This is the ladder up, now he will speak of the snake down:]
but there are trap doors....that you can't come back from
[whenever I hear him say this it scares the hell out of me the way he says it. It makes my hair stand up on the back of my neck. Until last farthings are paid there is no way to cross from one realm to another when the result of wrong ways happen to you after physical disembodiment. You just go to the recycling bin for a very long time...as John Lennon said: 'Time wounds all heels.']
I'm on your side
don't answer how
trap doors that open
I spiral down...
you're learning from zero here
There are clearly multiple valid interpretations of this song:
1 - It's about doors. No more, no less.
2 - Doors are a metaphor for people,
3 - choices, or
4 - frames of perception.
Before I read all this, I thought of it as kind of a document of progress in treating some psychological illness, presumably depression. The wall of bass noise interspersed with clean patches of chimes are changing medications and briefly finding something that works, dropping back into noise when it ceases to work.
The apparent sidewaysness of the album could be a reference to the always-falling feeling some people get, me included.
I wasn't terribly clear in the third paragraph how the chimey music and the drums relate to multistable perception. Throughout the song we hear both the chimes and the drums. In the main part of the song, the chimes arae in the background and barely noticable. They shift to the forefront when the music changes to the elevator-music-sounding melody, but the drums are still there, in the background. This inversion between the chimes and the drums, back to front, front to back, is where the "multistable" perception comes in, an effect reinforced by the extremely different psychological feel of the two parts.
I also wanted to point out that on the album this song comes right before You and What Army. I think this is significant... there's a relation between the elevator music psychology and the computerized sounds of Pull/Pulk, and the resistance to empire that You and What Army is about.
I think this theme comes out in a number of ways in the song. To me, the music has a very "psychological" feel... maybe it has something to do with how the drums pulse between the two ears. Maybe something to do with the fact that the drums begin with this big booming sound (like a train, someone said on here) and then just repeat over and over again at various intervals.
The multistable perception comes in through the lyrics (people have already discussed on here how the lyrics correspond to the "doors of perception" so I won't bother) and also through the chimes in the background. It sounds like elevator music, like music that would be in some huge sterile office building. At various points in the song, the drums stop and we are left only with the most "normal" sounding music, music we could hear in the bathroom of a fast food chain or something. Subtly, in the background, the trippy drums are still kicking, but they are muted and the treble is turned up high so we almost don't even notice it. But then, just as suddenly, the song booms back into those drums, and we again begin to explore various perceptions of reality.
There's another way that I think the multistable perception comes through... I'm not sure if I can explain it though. The song as a whole, with the pulsing booms of its drums, offers us very little in the way of melody or any conventional music that we can "follow" with our mind. However there seems to be some inverted logic to it (i loved how somebody on here said "sideways") and we can follow, almost as if there is a melody that makes no sound. It compels us to perceive the music in a way we are not familiar with, an alternate "door of perception."