Lyrics for Love Love Love as interpreted by fuckedupdog

Love Love Love Lyrics
King Saul fell on his sword
When it all went wrong
And Joseph's brother sold him down the river
For a song
And Sonny Liston rubbed some tiger balm in his glove
some things you do for money
and some you do for love love love

Raskalnikov felt sick
But he couldn't say why
When he saw his face reflected
In his victim's twinkling eye
Some things you do for money
And some you'll do for fun
But the things you do for love
Are gonna come back to you one by one

Love love is gonna lead you by the hand
Into a white and soundless place
Now we see this
As in a mirror dimly
Then we shall see each other
Face to face

And way out in Seattle
Young Kurt Cobain
Snuck out to the garden
Put a bullet in his brain
Snakes in the grass beneath our feet
Rain in the clouds above
Some moments last forever
And some flare out with love love love

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Fullerov
05-07-2005

Rated 0 
Just a couple of points besides they typos.

It is King Saul that commits suicide not King Sol. This is a reference to King Saul in the books of Samuel in the bible.

And the killer is Raskalnikov, a character in Crime and Punishment

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Fullerov
05-07-2005

Rated 0 
Damn! a typo of my own.

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fuckedupdog
05-07-2005

Rated 0 
yeah i get all the refferences. just didn't know how to spell them. thanx for the help!

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weezerific:cutlery
12-04-2005

Rated 0 
"some moments last forever and some flare out with love love love" beautiful. that's why i love john darnelle.

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mrwuggs
12-16-2005

Rated 0 
I played this song for a friend and got an unexpected reaction: he laughed. When I asked him why, he simply stated "Those moments defiantly do no 'flare up with love-love-love.'"

This bothered me because that simple thought had not really occurred to me. At the first listen, I was overcome with a feeling that all of these were loving actions. I suppose when examined rationally, they are not. Then again, neither John nor myself seem to be exceptionally rational people.

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RedLeaf
12-20-2005

Rated +2 
This song blew my mind until I was listened to Weekend Edition on National Public Radio and heard John interviewed after The Sunset Tree's release.

When asked about this song he said:

"the point of the song is we are very well damaged by the legacy of the romantic poet, that we think of love as a thing that is with strings and is this force for good and then if something bad happens thats not love...I don't know so much about that I don't know that the Greeks weren't right, I think that they were, that love can beat a path through everytihng, that it will destroy alot of things on the way to its objective which is just its expression of itself. You know my stepfather mistreated us terribly quite often, but he loved us and well, that to me is something worth commenting on in the hopes of undoing aot of what I percieve is terrible damage, yet we talk about love as this benign comfortable force: it is wild."

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learn2kneel
01-09-2006

Rated -1 
This song is very meaningful to me and I actually wrote an essay on it. It basically boils down to the song being about fate, and about how even in the horrible things that happen there is a force of love in the world, whatever we believe that force to be. It also gives the hope that someday we'll understand what this force is and know why we went through those hard times on earth.

The whole breakdown of the song and its meaning is posted at my blog here - http://musicforants.blogspot.com/2006/01/mountain-goats-love-love-love.html

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Yer_Ma
02-12-2006

Rated 0 
I love this song so much (no pun intended!) I far prefer the "Come, Come To The Sunset Tree" version though

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quails
05-18-2006

Rated 0 
In case anyone else is wondering who Sonny Liston is, he was a boxer who allegedly put something to "blind" his opponents on his glove when he wasn't doing so well in a fight. (I might be the only person who doesn't know enough about boxing to have heard the story about Liston and Cassius Clay before, but I figured I'd throw it out there.)

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hab204
07-17-2006

Rated 0 
can someone anyone decipher redleaf's quote though? what was he actually trying to say? i want to know his intent, but that quote seems convoluted to me.

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McWatt
08-05-2006

Rated 0 
Hab -
Love isn't some hunky dorey, warm, fuzzy force...it's so powerful that it can destroy and cause harm in its expression, so to speak. As displayed by his stepfather doing horrible things, but not being an unloving father.

Short n sweet, his last line in the quote sums it up - love is wild.

Amazing song.

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Sunset Rubdown
11-07-2006

Rated 0 
its about selfish love

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JulyJuly
12-28-2006

Rated 0 
I agree w/SunsetRubdown, and would take it a step further. I think this song is a slightly sarcastic jab at mushy love songs, and it is an ode to self-love, which is the motivating force in all of the actions described in the song. The song even speaks to the way that self interested actions can reveal to us our true natures, as in these lines: "Now we see this/As in a mirror dimly/Then we shall see each other/Face to face," and in Raskolnikov's [

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seedsofsedition
03-21-2007

Rated 0 
love has no definition
it has been tamed into a soft joyous thing in human minds, though it isn't.
Love isn't anything, it just is; in all of it's glorious and devious manifestations.

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RubyCalifornia
03-24-2007

Rated 0 
I swear its 'snuck out to the greenhouse' instead of garden??

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Sunset Rubdown
03-24-2007

Rated 0 
yeah definately is

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HeadlessHorseman
03-29-2007

Rated 0 
great song.
love how they mention kurt cobain.

but i think its about how you cant get away from love even if you wanted to.

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whiteknight3392
04-23-2007

Rated 0 
For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. 1 Corinthians 13:12

im believe then refers to in heaven, btw.

magnum opus? maybe not, but close.

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vulgar
05-21-2007

Rated 0 
best song on the sunset tree

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splintercat
08-25-2007

Rated 0 
The song and Darnielle's quote above reminds me of what Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil: "That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil." I think that's the message of the song - love is a force separate from morality that causes people to do things that can be good (as the "legacy of the romantic poets" says love always is) or bad (as most of the examples in the song are, just like, as John says, his stepfather mistreated them but still loved them).

The 1 Corinthians verse - "Now we see things as in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face" - comes towards the end of the very famous chapter on love, the one that's read at wedding ceremonies, with the list - "Love is patient, love is kind..." The chapter describes the qualities of love and talks about how all actions are meaningless if not done with love and love will endure beyond our prophecies, our languages, our knowledge. Verse 12 is about the time after the judgment/second coming when we have "put away childish things (13:11)". The final verse of the chapter is "And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love," meaning that those three continue to exist eternally. I've always thought 1 Cor. 13:12 was a powerful statement that one day we will understand why things happen; now we can only interpret the world narrowly, because we can't see the whole, but when we're with God we will be able to understand the meaning behind the tragedy in the world.

John seems to be attacking Corinthians' list of only the positive qualities of love and rejecting the idea that doing an action with love automatically transforms it into a good action, while affirming the epistler's statement that love is a constant.

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dut13
10-04-2007

Rated 0 
i might be looking into this to much, but do you think that the only reason that there is a reference to kurt cobain, is because of courtney love. do you think that he might be suggesting that he went out to the greenhouse, and the reason there is a bullet in his brain was because of courtney love love love.

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Cool Coz
03-27-2008

Rated 0 
The killer's name is Raskolnikov. With an 'o', not an 'a'. I am actually reading crime and punishment at the moment and while I was at work I heard this song and had an amazing moment.

It also happened to me with Belle & Sebastian. They have a song called 'This is just a modern rock song' where one of the lyrics goes like this:

I'm not as sad as Dostoevsky
I'm not as clever as Mark Twain
I only buy a book for the way it looks
and stick it on the shelf again

Dostoevsky being the author of 'Crime and Punishment'.

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Sussex
04-29-2008

Rated 0 
"Crime & Punishment" is probably my favorite novel of all time. Raskolnikov is a university dropout who stumbles upon the idea that he and larger-than-life historical figures (like Napoleon) are "overmen," people who are remarkable and thus above the moral scrutiny and justice that govern the rest of humanity. He believes that the fruits of his labors will be so completely worth any "sins" he may commit to achieve them that those sins will be pardonable. To prove this theory, Raskolnikov decides to murder his pawnbroker.

The sickness John describes in the song is pivotal to the book. Raskolnikov follows through with the murder, but the guilt and disgust it brings him drive him to confess, thereby undoing him and his theory. Had Raskolnikov murdered the woman for money, he wouldn't have been tortured as he was, as he'd have achieved his goal of robbing the pawnbroker. Similarly, if he'd killed her for fun, he'd have satiated his bloodlust.

Instead, he killed the woman out of love: love for his own idea.

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no anesthetic
05-25-2008

Rated 0 
This song doesn't seem to be about love in the truest sense of the word; I think it's about all the crap we call "love" that actually turns out to really just be narcissism or obsession or emotion (i.e. the references to the historical/cultural/biblical/literary figures who were so obsessed with their ambitions that they killed themselves -not because they didn't have love, but because what they loved was something sick and recklessly self-interested.)

When he quotes the Bible about only seeing things dimly, but one day seeing each other face to face he seems to be saying something like: "yeah, we all have a pretty f-ed up idea about what love is and how to express it, but one day (in heaven?) we'll see it clearly and probably regret a lot of things that we did out of 'love'."

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loveledbythehand
09-19-2008

Rated 0 
"Some things you do for money
And some you'll do for fun
But the things you do for love
Are gonna come back to you one by one"

almost what I live by now.

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