Lyrics for Glenn Tipton as interpreted by luke.

Glenn Tipton Lyrics
Cassius Clay was hated
More than Sonny Liston
Some like K.K. Downing
More than Glenn Tipton
Some like Jim Nabors
Some Bobby Vinton
I like 'em all

I put my feet up
On the coffee table
I stay up late watching cable
I like old movies with Clark Gable
Just like my dad does

Just like my dad did
When he was home
Staying up late,
Staying up alone
Just like my dad did
When he was thinking
Oh, how fast the years fly

I know an old woman
Ran a donut shop
She worked late serving cops
Then one morning
Babe, her heart stopped
Place ain't the same no more

Place ain't the same no more
Not without my friend, Eleanor
Place ain't the same no more
Man, how things change

I buried my first victim
When i was nineteen
Went through her bedroom
And the pockets of her jeans
And found her letters
That said so many things
That really hurt me bad

I never breathed
Her name again
But I like to dream
About what could have been
I never heard her calls again
But I like to dream

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insulatedsoul
05-29-2004

Rated 0 
This is a lovely song that gives you a good feeling, Sun Kil Moon has a great sound which is hard to come across and I hope Mark Kozelek continues to make music in SKM or Red House Painters for a long time.

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octave
10-07-2004

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So, this seems to be a narrative from a serial killer, a typical American maniac, with a life defined by pop culture and TV? Or is the "buried my first victim" part just a metaphor?

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octave
10-07-2004

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So, this seems to be a narrative from a serial killer, a typical American maniac, with a life defined by pop culture and TV? Or is the "buried my first victim" part just a metaphor?

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glentipton
12-16-2004

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I think that's just a metaphor. I love this song, i love the picking pattern in it, it gives me shivers.

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tragicrock
01-29-2005

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I don't know...this song has always perturbed me. I believe the first 2 verses are about Kozelek...but then the last! Maybe he killed a girl when he was 19? Confession perhaps! If it's metaphor...of what? Sounds pretty straight forward. I think its just weird personally. Still one of my favorite albums of all time though.

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ttuutt
03-02-2005

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the "I buried my first victim" part is a metaphore. the sub meaning for it is that his relationship with a girl, who was his first love, fell apart. after the relationship ended he ran into some old love letters and he came to the realisation of the love that he lost and missed. this is seen in the next section of the song whith him missing her voice calling to him and that his dreams still haunt him for the loss of love

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ThePromiseRing8
12-20-2005

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ttuutt, I think you're correct about him "burying his first victim" to be metaphorical not literal.

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McAn
07-20-2006

Rated 0 
This is such a wonderful song. One of my favourites of all time.

The song is about how time changes things. In his case it seems for the worse. He´s looking back at better times from his past.

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tastemaker
11-30-2006

Rated 0 
The part about burying his first victim was unsettling for me at the beginning as well, especially since it did not coincide with the tone of the song. Then I actually listened to the rest of the words closely and realized it was a literary device.
Silly me.

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radam04
02-09-2007

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i know it's already been talked about, but i just got the idea that this song might be a story about this guy who is really lonely and actually does murder a girl. like, he has a history of lonliness (he remembers his dad on the couch as a kid, his 'friend' is a waitress at a diner he'd go to) and this led to him being unstable, and he became infatuated with a girl, maybe because she gave him some sort of attention. and when she rejected him like the rest of the world, he killed her. i dunno, just a thought

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tastemaker
03-06-2007

Rated 0 
That's actually an interesting way to think of it.

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brianjj
03-13-2007

Rated 0 
I disagree...
I've always taken this song from a more literal standpoint. I think it's a beautiful look inside a wretched mind. I can easily picture someone in prison explaining how good life used to be, interrupted by horrific memories of his wrongdoings.
I also find it funny how if you look at it this way, a man telling his story, he says "I never breathed her name again" when in fact he said her name in the song. Perhaps that's a little far-fetched... but either way the lyrics of the song are beautiful and bone-chilling at the same time.
-brianj

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tastemaker
03-14-2007

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I don't believe he actually said her name in the song, Brian. Eleanor is the owner of the donut shop.

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brianjj
03-14-2007

Rated 0 
yeah, that makes sense too.

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grahamdalton
05-28-2007

Rated 0 
I really doubt Sun Kil Moon is telling a story about a murderer. Look at the arc of Mark's writing, and you see his references to metaphorical death (Carry Me Ohio being the prime example).
And song is the same. The first stanzas refer to the death of his fond memories of his father ("man how things change").
Then he writes about the death of Eleanor, and how that has killed that wondrous place as well ("place ain't the same no more).
Finally, the last stanzas. It sounds as if HE killed the relationship, probably by looking through "her bedroom and the pockets of her jeans." Perhaps he discovered infidelity. Or perhaps his girlfriend's true feelings. But whatever was in those letters, it killed that innocent part of him, perhaps the one that believed in love.
But it seems a stretch that a band as peaces (and morbidly life-affirming in so many other songs) would write literally about a killer -- particularly when those two paragraphs would be a striking departure from virtually everything else they've ever written.

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MattyD
06-17-2007

Rated 0 
i've come to think that the last two verses are about a girl who killed herself / was killed by addiction. she is a "victim" of youth or change...he does say that he was nineteen at the time. this would explain the letters that he'd found that had hurt him (maybe she was thinking things that she never said to anyone).

it just seems unlikely that this song is about a serial killer...

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HadjiQuest
01-03-2008

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I think those last verses may be about a girl who killed herself, who was a close friend/girlfriend. Thus his first "victim" is his first wronged lover, and that kind of sets off for the entire album to revolve around the same concepts and characters. The suicide/wronged lover theme pops up again in Carry Me, Ohio, and then the rest of the album builds on the idea of remembering those who've gone before their time, up to Duk Koo Kim, where the singer talks about how quickly life can end and missing his lost love.

So, that's my theory. The entire album is the narrator remembering this girl who he feels he ignored and who ended up killing herself/dying at some point. I wonder how autobiographic it is, and if it actually did happen to mark, if it has anything to do with the RHP song Drop.

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crumbs
04-28-2008

Rated 0 
I definetley believe its the lost first love view point. He's lost her - murdered their love in a sense... he no longer speaks her name for fear of the feelings it revives, but he still likes to dream about her.
Such a beautiful, bittersweet song...

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spainman_88
07-30-2008

Rated 0 
I agree that it can be a metaphor to the things mentioned above, but I also think this song is a lot about the randomness and chance in life, and how things don't always have a reason, or make sense....often in life things just 'are.'
The first verse really says this to me 'Cassius Clay was hated more than Sonny Liston...Some like KK Downing more than Glenn Tipton' as in explaining that things are random and don't always have explanations. Couple this with the line 'Then one morning her heart stopped' as in, randomness in life occurs again and you're not alive anymore.
In the second to last verse I can see randomness in his going through her jeans and finding letters that hurt him and led to a particular outcome, whether it was her suicide, the end of a love, etc.
I agree that he is lamenting things from his past, lost loves and even death. But I think he is sadly remembering dreams of the past while painting them in a random light. My guess.

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sortilegus
09-19-2008

Rated 0 
Alright, everybody's freaking out that this song might be about a murderer, but, after listening to it a couple times again recently, I've come to the conclusion that each section of the song is a DIFFERENT speaker.

So there are three speakers in the song, one obsessed with television personalities and the idea of his father, the second upset about losing his friend at the doughnut shop, and the last a murderer. The great thing about the song is that all share the same kind of anguish that life is hard and things change so fast and painfully.

Anyway, that's what I think, but it's obviously open for interpretation. Either way, I think the murder is literal. Everything else in the song is.

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BuckWilder
12-02-2008

Rated 0 
At first I thought of the last part of the lyrics in a literal sense, until I heard the part about finding her letters and feeling hurt. I don't think a serial killer has this type of sentiment for the people they kill. Psychopaths tend not to feel hurt or remorse or loss the way normal people do, and it's doubtful that they'd bother going through the victim's belongings afterwards anyway. The sentiment of a serial killer doesn't really seem to match up with the rest of the song either, because earlier he's talking about how the years pass quickly and he feels bad that a woman at a coffee shop died. I very much doubt that a serial killer would have this kind of emotional response either. Another thing is not wanting to hear her name or never breathing her name implies remorse as well. Remorse serial killers tend not to feel about their victims, they usually have a sense of accomplishment about their deeds. So if the person isn't a psychopath they most likely aren't a real serial killer, and if they aren't a serial killer then it probably relates to love lost. The first love of the narrator's life being killed. This could be either figuratively or literally, I think it's probably figurative.

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AFI084
01-15-2009

Rated 0 
While yes, lyrics can always be read however you want them to be, I can say with a good deal of confidence that this song is pretty explicitly about the artist's nostalgic and sentimental feelings about how times change. The song begins by throwing out the names of a few boxers who (besides Cassius Clay, who is Muhammad Ali) for the most part, are completely unfamiliar to our generation. Here, Kozelek is contrasting the fame these once very famous boxers had with the ignorance the current youth has to their existence, which he does to show how he thinks its funny things can change so radically.

This idea of past/lost time the main theme of the song (hence why the song is called Glenn Tipton, as it revolves around the theme of changed times via the motif of the boxers), and it is mirrored by the later lines and stanzas of the poem. Kozelek reflects on things his dad used to do, writes about how an old lady named Elenor, and wonders what happened with a lost love (you guys are reading this WAY too literally), which are all times in his life that have past (notice the contrasting of the past and present tenses in the song). Still, although these times and people have left his life for whatever reasons, as Kozelek writes, he likes to dream and think about how fast time flies and how much things have changed.

This is a really awesome song. Sun Kil Moon makes great music, and I'm glad to see people enjoy it on this site.

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kidshowbusiness
06-04-2009

Rated 0 
I think I figured out the "Buried my first victim" line. It's not literal, and it's not entirely simple. Mark, who is speaking as himself the entire song, is describing the memory of an exciting but failed relationship, that he subsequently "buried" deep inside to ease his torment. Now, a little less easy to decipher is that he refers to her as the "victim" only in the sense that she was left worse off after dating such an admittedly insufferable personality.

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prettymanster
09-03-2009

Rated 0 
I think it is awesome, that there is so much debate on the meaning of this song. As Townes Van Zandt said "I'd like to write songs so good nobody understands them, not even me."

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TheWrongGirl
10-10-2009

Rated 0 
it's funny when i read descriptions, and think about how meaningful a song is to me that i really never much thought about the meaning of.

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