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We found your name across the chapel door
Carved in cursive with a table fork
Muddy hymnals
And some bootmarks where you'd been
The shaking preacher told the captain's man
The righteous suffer in a fallen land
And pulled the shade
To keep the crowd from peeking in
We found your children by the tavern door
With wooden buttons and an apple core
Playing house
And telling everyone you'd drowned
The begging choir told the captain's man
We all assume the worst the best we can
And for a round or two
They'd gladly track you down
We found you sleeping by your lover's stone
A ream of paper and a telephone
A broken bow
Across a long lost violin
Your lover's angel told the captain's man
It never ends the way we had it planned
And kissed her palm
And placed it on your dreaming head
Carved in cursive with a table fork
Muddy hymnals
And some bootmarks where you'd been
The shaking preacher told the captain's man
The righteous suffer in a fallen land
And pulled the shade
To keep the crowd from peeking in
We found your children by the tavern door
With wooden buttons and an apple core
Playing house
And telling everyone you'd drowned
The begging choir told the captain's man
We all assume the worst the best we can
And for a round or two
They'd gladly track you down
We found you sleeping by your lover's stone
A ream of paper and a telephone
A broken bow
Across a long lost violin
Your lover's angel told the captain's man
It never ends the way we had it planned
And kissed her palm
And placed it on your dreaming head
Lyrics submitted by slickboot
Track duration: 02:44
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This song to me is about 3 people. The singer, a woman, and the past love(who has died).
"Found your name across the chapel door carved in cursive with a table fork"
The singer who is the current lover of the woman comes to the funeral. He sees the name she was suppose to have after marrying the past love. The description its carved in cursive with a table fork means it took a long time. Something someone would have to take time to do. It was suppose to be her name.
"Found your children by the tavern door"
Once again these were the children she was suppose to have. The past lover married someone else.
"Found you sleeping by your lover's stone, a ream of paper and a telephone, a broken bow across a long lost violin."
He finds her at the grave. The ream of paper is the address for the funeral, whilst the telephone is the call she got informing her of the lover's passing. A broken bow across a violin is a metaphor for them being meant to be together or at least she thought but now he's gone/broken.
"Your lover's angel told the captain's man, it never ends the way we had it planned, kissed your palm and placed it on your dreaming head"
This is either what she feels happened or what she tells herself. If her lover could speak to her he would tell her he loved her things just don't work out sometimes. Right person, wrong time that kind of thing.
Thats just my dumb interpretation. Alot of Beam's music that deal with love seem to have the same theme of being plagued with the regret of letting that one get away. Look at "Bird Stealing Bread", "Promising Light", "Sixteen Maybe Less" and "Passing Afternoon"
Table forks are not found in chapels, nor would someone use one for a premeditated crime of vandalism. It suggests an item grabbed in a moment of anger and pain and used in a relatively spontaneous act. "Some bootmarks" don't suggest a lot of activity to me either, rather an attempt at prayer.
The shaking preacher, his actions, and use of the word "righteous" and "fallen land" suggest to me that he is referring to an indignity (vandalizing the church and perhaps causing a small commotion inside) that he himself suffered, at the hands of someone who is simply a member of a community who doesn't care much for the church and its traditions, rather than someone who has committed a crime against someone else.
I think "you" is a man, friends with the singer, who lost a lover in a tragedy. He first neglects his kids out of agony and desolation, to the point where they have nothing and have essentially given up on him as someone who looks after him. He ends up down at the tavern where he proceeds to go on a binge. In a fit of drunken rage and anger, he grabs a fork off the tavern table and rushes out stumbling off to who knows where. The children, sometime later, almost playfully say he's drowned. I imagine that the town is near a river and its been raining, and when people disappear off for a while in places like that people say, oh he must have gone off and drowned. The children really mean, who knows where the hell that train wreck went off to. (if you walk into a dive bar and ask where one of the missing and frequently drunk and annoying regulars is, you often get a similar response from his friends). In actuality he ran to the chapel and defaced it in anger at God for taking his lover, and then broke down and prayed, finally stumbling off to the grave of his lover where he passes out. The imagery of the phone, paper, and violin are I think, as virtuallypainless points out, poetic elements added to the story to express an inability and frustration with communicating to his lover. The captain is the police captain, language consistent with this old fashioned English(?) vocabulary like tavern and chapel, who sends his man to inquire about the issue. He goes round the chapel, and the tavern, where he finds a bunch of drunken beggars who as gossips love to exaggerate stories, and as drunks offer to go find the missing man for a drink. He, and the singer, finally finds the man sleeping at the grave. The angel is in my opinion not the lover, but a benevolent, all-knowing, heavenly onlooker who closes the chapter with a tender expression of love, care, pity, and beauty, as the man has found his lover in his dreams.
This beautiful song has a tone which is not angry, nor is it judgmental. The man is somebody we can identify with, at least better than the other characters. It is sad, and sympathetic. At least that's my take.
A ream of paper and a telephone
-- A ream of paper is useless without a typewriter. A telephone is useless without a cord, which it likely doesn't have out in the middle of a cemetery.
A broken bow across a long lost violin
-- A broken bow isn't going to make any music on a violin that isn't even there.
Written word, spoken word, and music are all forms of communication. Sam has so poignantly expressed a complete inability to communicate here, despite the subject's desperate desire to bridge the gap between the living and the dead to be closer with his lost love.
I see this song as a story, and I personally don't care if the lover was the captain's wife, the captain's fiancee, or the subject's wife. It's beautiful. This song is simple yet cryptic and incredibly beautiful. One of the songs that drew me in to Iron & Wine.
1. Man loses his wife sometime fairly recently. (The kids aren't grown up yet, but the wife has been buried already, so I don't think it's a murder).
2. He gets angry one night and wants to drown himself. He drops the kids off at the tavern, and has them tell everyone that he's drowned.
3. He heads off to the river, where he tries to drown himself, but something happens after he's in the water. Maybe he panics, or realizes the value of life, or his wife's angel stops him.
4. In frustration, he tromps off to the church in his muddy boots, where he creates a huge mess, kicking hymnals around, and leaving mud prints everywhere.
5. For some reason he wants to vandalize the church, but wants everyone to know it was him. He grabs the only thing nearby (a table fork) and carves his name above the door. Maybe he feels forgotten in his misery, and is crying out for attention.
6. -- The rest is pretty much what everyone else has said, except for the murder bit.
that's my take anyway :)
Also, manuel, please do not call other people's comments stupid...even if you're going to say, "no offense" afterward. There are many layers of meaning to this cryptically worded song and every interpretation on here, including your own, adds legitimate insight into what is being said.