Lyrics for Armchairs as interpreted by bobwronski

Armchairs Lyrics
I dreamed you were a cosmonaut
of the space between our chairs
And I was a cartographer
of the tangles in your hair

I sang the song that silence sings
It's the one that everybody knows, everybody knows
The song that silence sings
And this is how it goes

These looms that weave apocrypha
they're hanging from a strand
The dark and empty rooms were full
of incandescent hands

The awkward pause
The fatal flaw
Time, it's a crooked bow
Time is a crooked bow

In time you need to learn, to love
The ebb just like the flow
Grab hold of your bootstraps, and pull like hell
until gravity feels sorry for you, and lets you go
As if you lack the proper chemicals to know
the way it felt the last time you let yourself fall this low

Time's a crooked bow
Time's a crooked bow
Time, it's a crooked bow

Fifty-five and three-eighths years later
At the bottom of a gigantic crater
An armchair calls to you
Yeah, and armchair calls to you
It says, someday, we'll get back at them all
With epoxy and a pair of pliers
As ancient sea slugs begin to crawl
through the ragweed and barbed wire

You didn't write
You didn't call
It didn't cross your mind at all
Through the waves
waves of hay and straw
You couldn't feel a thing at all
Fifty-five and three-eighths
Time
Fifty-five and three-eighths
Time
Time

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bobwronski
09-29-2005

Rated 0 
K special thanks to Pants for tellin me the title of this song :)
This is just about my favorite song ever. It's so epic and... dynamic, and I just love it. The 1st stanza and the 3rd are sheer brilliance... "these looms that weave apocrypha"... damn! That's good. I also love the oxymoron of dark and empty rooms being full of incandescent hands, heh. I don't even want to start thinking about the meaning right now; I just want to experience the song for the moment.

If I didn't get the lyrics right feel free to post corrections.

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IAmACliche
12-19-2005

Rated 0 
isn't it Armchair Apocolypse? yeah im sure im wrong...but its a lovely song.

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bobwronski
12-19-2005

Rated 0 
I'm not sure, I saw him live last month (wow!!!) and he called it "Armchairs of the Apocalypse," but I've heard it referred to as your title and mine as well. Maybe he hasn't decided on a title yet, and uses all three?

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sevenislucky
01-11-2006

Rated 0 
I was lucky enough to see him last month too *yeah....incredible!* and I think he called it Apocalypse In An Armchair. Maybe he just likes confusing us eh?...haha

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cyanidebreathmint
03-03-2006

Rated 0 
well you know how he is. hes always changing his music around. ( one of the many reasons why i love him so ^-^) i bet if we looked hard enough we could find even more versions of the title!

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awebb089
12-19-2006

Rated 0 
bobwronski-
I love all of your analyses of Bird's lyrics, and am beyond jealous that you were able to see him live.
On the fabchannel.com performance of "Armchair Apocrypha", though, I heard him say "bring" instead of "sing" in the first line of the second stanza.

I would love to hear your interpretation of this song eventually! Can't wait for this album to come out.

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laocoon
01-27-2007

Rated 0 
The one I was sent is called "Armchairs"

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Spacecow
02-12-2007

Rated 0 
"Armchairs" does seem to be the final title of the song, though the album itself is still Armchair Apocrypha.

Anyway, wow. One of his best.

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blame_monster
02-18-2007

Rated 0 
This song is very reminiscent of "Weather Systems" in many ways, especially in its slow, slender violin introduction and its complex song structure (among other things, of course).

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jadedgypsy
02-19-2007

Rated 0 
In time you need to learn, to love
The ebb just like the flow
Grab hold of your bootstraps, and pull like hell
until gravity feels sorry for you, and lets you go
As if you lack the proper chemicals to know
the way it felt the last time you let yourself fall this low

wow, this part is my favorite. i agree with bobwronski, this song is quite an epic.

i think it's about the (imminent?) crumbling of a relationship. in the first stanza, he seems to be conveying the emotional distance between two people, even though they're only a chair apart.

i don't know how the verse beginning with "Fifty-five and three-eighths years later" would correspond with that. what exactly does time's a crooked bow mean?

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blame_monster
03-07-2007

Rated 0 
its just a guess, but:
theres a theory (actually its almost become a figure of speech) that says that time, because of its linear properties (meaning it changes at a constant rate), can be warped or bent. This is usually used to explain time travel in science fiction novels and such, but can also be used in a far more figurative sense. I've taken this line almost as, "Things tend to come back to bite you later."

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blame_monster
03-07-2007

Rated 0 
and as for the "Fifty-five and three-eighths":
often (and i know this from experience) artists will often use seemingly random pieces of information pulled from life experiences. lyrics don't have to be (and andrew bird's often aren't) entirely explicit. There's probably something profound and intellectual about this reference, but sometimes, it's better to just interpret it your own way.

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eisey
03-18-2007

Rated 0 
here's my thinking on "time is a crooked bow"

there's a lot of different symbolism involved there, but here's the one that comes most often to my mind. i think of it as in reference to a bow and arrow, and a crooked bow is one that is taught, pulled, ready to be let go of in order to fire. if time's a crooked bow, perhaps the more time given, the more the bow is bent, and in that, the inevitable becomes even more so until it eventually has to be released and fired.

but the idea of time as a structure that can be bent, rather than a purely linear construction presents its own fascinating possibilities as well.

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jadedgypsy
03-22-2007

Rated 0 
thanks blame monster and eisey for giving your take on what 'time's a crooked bow' might mean. blame monster, i do know that not all of the lyrics are meant to be explicitly referring to something in particular. but i was asking more because i thought there might have been some specific references that i missed. looks like i didn't. thanks anyway :)

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Quisquilloso
03-22-2007

Rated 0 
I agree that his lyrics tend to avoid the specific, but I can't help thinking that "Time's arrow" is a famous reference to entropy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time

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spmulligan
03-26-2007

Rated 0 
Sounds so much like Jeff Buckley

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vinylskirt
03-26-2007

Rated 0 
this song is just so beautiful.
i totally agree with eisey about the meaning of "time is a crooked bow".

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Quisquilloso
03-30-2007

Rated 0 
"incandescent hands" = luminous hands of a clock? (Time)

The line about waves is actually "waves of a.m. squall." A squall is a sudden wind, so this could be a storm at sea. A squall is also a sort of scream, and waves could be airwaves, so it could also a.m. radio. Hmm.

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brandonius
04-03-2007

Rated 0 
I think the 'Fifty-five and three-eighths years' lyric refers to someone 55+ years old - probably about the age Andrew's parents would be. Also, the image of an armchair makes you think of an older person, not that 55 is that old.

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eisey
04-04-2007

Rated 0 
These looms that weave apocrypha
they're hanging from a strand
The dark and empty rooms were full
of incandescent hands

exactly. hands of a clock. kind of a foreboding image, in all honesty. rooms that would be completely dark if not for the ticking clocks inside, being the only life to be found in there.

the image leading up to time being a crooked bow.

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Quisquilloso
04-05-2007

Rated 0 
The truly strange thing about 'fifty-five and three-eighths' is that he uses it in reference to years, and then at the end he says 'you're fifty-five and three-eighths tall,' which really makes no sense at all (though for some reason it makes me think of feeling incomplete or short of something). Interesting that he uses it to refer to both time and space, perhaps, but I suspect it's an arbitrary number with a good sound. Maybe a jab at the urge to quantify?

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okriver27
04-05-2007

Rated 0 
The song is title just "Armchairs" on the back of the cd case and the booklet featuring the lyrics.

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Quisquilloso
04-13-2007

Rated 0 
Some thoughts, in case anyone finds them useful:

"armchair something" - eg, an armchair quarterback - refers to someone removed from the actual action. Webster's puts it really well: "remote from direct dealing with problems." There's a lot of passivity/inaction in this song.

"a cosmonaut of the space between our chairs" conjures up not simply the great distance between them, but a cosmonaut is also free of gravity (more on gravity below). Cartographers not only deal with distances, but they deal with them at an analytic/conceptual remove (ie, maps are only representations of what they represent).

No one's mentioned it and it may be obvious, but looms, weaving, and cut strands are classic references to the Greek Fates. Even if the "incandescent hands" are the hands of a clock, they also tie in the to the weaving, which amazes me.

When he talks about pulling yourself up until "gravity...lets you go," it could refer to simply pulling yourself out of an armchair, out of a depression, or, if you link it to the cosmonaut idea, pulling yourself out of yourself and towards someone else. Gravity here could also imply a grave mood, an overseriousness. In this respect, the song reminds me as well of Weather Systems, as mentioned above.

"You didn't write/You didn't call...You didn't feel a thing at all" could be the speaker yelling at himself for not having done anything, for his own "awkward pause/fatal flaw," and then for sitting through an emotional storm (waves, squall) in a state of numbness/inaction. More armchair passivity, and regret.

I love the above thoughts on time as a tensed and dangerous bow (and also the implication of a single shot, a single chance). It's also occurred to me that the mathematical/scientific symbol for infinity resembles a crooked bow, but I don't think the idea of infinity adds much here, unless you want to invoke time just dragging on.

I think that's all for now, except to add that I am greatly amused by the fact of Google ads for actual armchairs appearing to the right of these lyrics.

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turbomaniscrazy
04-15-2007

Rated 0 
"Grab hold of your bootstraps, and pull like hell
until gravity feels sorry for you, and lets you go"
i love that part. hes saying not to give up and to keep on insisting. and that if you do fall down, just pull your self back up by "your bootstraps." my language arts teacher actually used that expression a week ago :)

this song just overall is amazing

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blame_monster
04-18-2007

Rated 0 
i feel that andrew bird's lyrics above all others are so incredibly and beautifully artistic and thought-packed that it would be impossible to truly understand it all.

SO

i think we all ought to forget our pedestrian theories and move on to a different song. If the meaning comes to somebody, or somebody gets the chance to ask the bird, himself just wtf it means, then i suppose you've got an obligation, but for the rest of us, lets just agree that it's hopeless and enjoy it like modern art: its really really cool without necessarily knowing its a picture of a house.

Quisquilloso: please no more chemistry, don't open the wounds i've so tirelessly healed... however, that was really an amazing reference, Bird definitely likes Salvador Dali, thats fo sho'

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