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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
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
Lyrics submitted by bobwronski
Track duration: 07:03
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This is one of my favorites and one of the reasons I am just completely in love with this artist
It starts out in a vague romantic vein but ends up talking about a much older relationship, an absent father. Not completely absent, but someone who shows up just for the parties. It's a censure and longing for something the narrator doesn't even know how to describe - so the stories of mom and dad are just apocryphal, rather than factual.
The line about bootstraps just makes my heart break and soar at the same time, and it's not specific to anything else but my very own broken heart - Andrew, you can work a lyric, can't you?
And there's so much wit in the lines about fixing it all with epoxy and pliers - in god knows how much time we'll get around to it eventually when the sea slugs well, you know
The 55 3/8 might refer to someone's age and how tall you ought to be by then
I don't freaking know. But I love this artist so much
He is basically dreaming of this love. She is so fixated on him, as if she were a cosmonaut of the space between their chairs- she is exploring the space- it's intimate. And he adores her, so he studies her, even down to the tangles in her hair.
But of course love is also sad and full of heartbreak- as everybody knows.... and this one is for everyone.
Basically time looms and weaves and there are heartaches; some immeasureable. And everyone has their hands up reaching and trying to grasp at happiness. But most don't find it- so they have to reacha point where they feel so low that gravity feels sorry for them. They have to pull up their boot straps.
After that first real heartbreak, 55 and 3/8 years after your early teens or twenties, you are tired and bitter- an armchair calls to you to rest. As you came into the world at peace you will go back to a peaceful, resting position... but you are bitter and swear you'll get back at the world... but the world keeps turning as it always has- with ancient sea slugs in the midst of barbed wire- old and new.
After that first heartbreak, the other person did not write or call- or you felt you did not even cross their mind. And you were numb.
Time is long but does little to change this feeling.
He is basically dreaming of this love. She is so fixated on him, as if she were a cosmonaut of the space between their chairs- she is exploring the space- it's intimate. And he adores her, so he studies her, even down to the tangles in her hair.
But of course love is also sad and full of heartbreak- as everybody knows.... and this one is for everyone.
Basically time looms and weaves and there are heartaches; some immeasureable. And everyone has their hands up reaching and trying to grasp at happiness. But most don't find it- so they have to reacha point where they feel so low that gravity feels sorry for them. They have to pull up their boot straps.
After that first real heartbreak, 55 and 3/8 years after your early teens or twenties, you are tired and bitter- an armchair calls to you to rest. As you came into the world at peace you will go back to a peaceful, resting position... but you are bitter and swear you'll get back at the world... but the world keeps turning as it always has- with ancient sea slugs in the midst of barbed wire- old and new.
After that first heartbreak, the other person did not write or call- or you felt you did not even cross their mind. And you were numb.
Time is long but does little to change this feeling.
While initially I was thinking a bow & arrow kind of bow (since I love archery), I quickly remembered that it's Andrew Bird here. C'mon. When a violinist talks about just a bow with no mention of arrows, then they're most likely talking about the kind they use to play their instrument.
The old bow getting very crooked is fantastic and I didn't know about that at all, but what I took away from it is that, with a new, straight bow, when you pull it across the strings, you get precisely what you expect. Yet, if the bow is crooked, you pull it across the strings and it totally isn't playing by your rules at that point. You have to adjust for it, you have to change because it's a force outside of yourself that has altered the playing experience. Much like time (or time passing in life) - as it goes by, you think you know what's coming up & try to prepare for it, then as it passes, it throws you a curveball, something totally unexpected, and you have to adjust to that.
In short, you may think you know what you're going to be doing in the future, you may have it all planned out to the letter, yet time, well... time's got other plans for you.
I think I was brought back to this song once "Break It Yourself" came out since he uses the exact same phrase again in "Lazy Projector" (which is quickly becoming one of my favorite tracks on that album).
In the beginning, she's a cosmonaut, reaching out to whoever gives the song point of view, which in itself is kind of an amazing thing to do. It's also kind of interesting how armchairs are introduced because they're kind of presented as a religion as themselves, but as a very unstable one. "these looms that weave apocryphal/they’re hanging from a strand." Like the armchairs (made of fabric, which looms produce) are a religion who's scriptures are wrong or fake or whatever and then as the looms fail or fall, there's an awkward pause and suddenly everything starts falling apart for both characters.
My favorite line in the whole song is actually "grab hold of your bootstraps/and pull like hell," because it's like this girl has just been completely devastated like she's lost all she's believed in. And then time just forgets her because the entire universe has given up on her as well, "‘till gravity feels sorry for you/and lets you go," because she can't process that she's fallen so low into this huge chasm/crater and time just goes on without her.
I think crooked bow is really like a violin bow because it's Andrew Bird we're talking about here and time to him time is a strange music that he can't really understand. Time is a crooked bow that plays across the strings of life, which makes sense to me mostly because it relates back to the looms that weave apocryphal. To this girl, the strings on the loom make up her belief in armchairs and her life and time, being a bow, crookedly plays across them, bending time and reality. Andrew Bird really just seems to think she's wasted all of her life in a crater because she couldn't just learn to love and move on by the end of the song.
So, time is bent far into the future after 55 and 3/8ths years and the girl hears what was basically her life (her god calling out to her, she's a new prophet, that sort of thing) calling to her to come fix the world. "yeah this armchair calls to you...we’ll get back at them all/with epoxy and a pair of pliers" as if her armchair religion wants her to get back at the world that forgot both her and the armchairs themselves. But, in doing this she forgets about Andrew Bird and so this great and wonderful cosmonaut that he once knew is suddenly nothing, just a 55 and 3/8ths tall person.
The song kind of seems to be saying that because this girl couldn't live to go with the flow and love, she fell from being an amazing comonaut of a person, reaching out to others, to being a small, vengeful nothing. It all seems to be an example of how religion can be misused and how it can make people crazy; I think it might also be describing kind of Andrew Bird's feelings towards religion. As if he actually experienced this and it turned him off of religion entirely.
I have no idea if that's right or not because I don't know anything about Andrew Bird's religion, but that's my take on it, I guess. This song is just so complex and wonderful :) I love it and also Andrew Bird in general
That being said, a few things stand out. The song's timbre and the image of the armchair (in combination with the line "An Armchair calls to you/It says someday…") recalls a deep malaise.
The second is alienation through time and space. The climax seems to deem our efforts to navigate the spaces between us a failure ("You didn't write/you didn't call/it didn't cross your mind at all").
What do you guys think?
Working from Quisquilloso's idea about entropy, etc... entropy refers to energy wasted or useless... time wasted, love lost due to inaction, regret... in the armchair, procrastinating. I love the idea about dreaming she was a cosmonaut in that space, wishing she had reached out, called or wrote.
55 and 3/8...time. Bird refers to numerology in other songs. Anybody know any signif about that # or just the obvious looking back at your life, the haunting image of wanting to go back to that armchair (that unresolved Gigantic crater in his life) and 'get back at them all'... the dream takes a nasty turn of wanting revenge?
Time is a trip, mysterious and unpredictable (crooked meaning warped, imperfect, challenging) like a crooked bow. Either the crooked bow and arrow of Mayan mythology (raggedy boy) or a violin bow which makes perfect sense, or even a bow tie (awkward...omg what a nightmare)
And Time is weird/scary in its vastness of possibility and its flying by. Mistakes, regret, in time you have to let go of those fears/anxieties by surrounding it with Love (the good/bad, ups/downs, "ebb/flow").
Also, fear paralyzes and keeps us in our lazyboy, procrastinating, pretty soon 55 yrs go by.
He warns (outside of the dream now) that you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. This is an old saying that refers to the struggle to keep going/get up even when you are really down.
God, he's good. An awesome poet with great messages!!! the only solution is love and persevere...
I want to add, Go Team
That's just what it means to me. I have no idea what is meant by the "epoxy and a pair of pliers." Maybe fixing what was broken? Straightening out time? Doesn't really matter I suppose.