This is a hauntingly beautiful song about introspection, specifically about looking back at a relationship that started bad and ended so poorly, that the narrator wants to go back to the very beginning and tell himself to not even travel down that road. I believe that the relationship started poorly because of the lines:
"Take me back to the night we met:When the night was full of terrors: And your eyes were filled with tears: When you had not touched me yet"
So, the first night was not a great start, but the narrator pursued the relationship and eventually both overcame the rough start to fall in love with each other:
"I had all and then most of you"
Like many relationships that turn sour, it was not a quick decline, but a gradual one where the narrator and their partner fall out of love and gradually grow apart
"Some and now none of you"
Losing someone who was once everything in your world, who you could confide in, tell your secrets to, share all the most intimate parts of your life, to being strangers with that person is probably one of the most painful experiences a person can go through. So Painful, the narrator wants to go back in time and tell himself to not even pursue the relationship.
This was the perfect song for "13 Reasons Why"
Well, I rang up Pantucci,
Spoke to Lu-chi,
I gave them all
They needed to know.
If affairs are proceeding
As we're expecting,
Soon enough the weak spots will show.
I assume you understand that we have options on your time,
And will ditch you in the harbour if we must:
But if it all works out nicely,
You'll get the bonus you deserve
From doctors we trust.
The Fat Lady of Limbourg
Looked at the samples that we sent
And furrowed her brow.
You would never believe that
She'd tasted royalty and fame
If you saw her now.
But her sense of taste is such that she'll distinguish with her tongue
The subtleties a spectrograph would miss,
And announce her decision,
While demanding her reward:
The jellyfish kiss.
Now we checked out this duck quack
Who laid a big egg, oh so black
It shone just like gold.
And the kids from the city,
Finding it pretty, took it home,
And there it was sold.
It was changing hands for weeks till someone left it by their fire
And it melted to a puddle on the floor:
For it was only a candle, a Roman scandal oh oh oh,
Now it's a pool.
That's what we're paid for
That's what we're paid for
That's what we're paid for here.
Spoke to Lu-chi,
I gave them all
They needed to know.
If affairs are proceeding
As we're expecting,
Soon enough the weak spots will show.
I assume you understand that we have options on your time,
And will ditch you in the harbour if we must:
But if it all works out nicely,
You'll get the bonus you deserve
From doctors we trust.
The Fat Lady of Limbourg
Looked at the samples that we sent
And furrowed her brow.
You would never believe that
She'd tasted royalty and fame
If you saw her now.
But her sense of taste is such that she'll distinguish with her tongue
The subtleties a spectrograph would miss,
And announce her decision,
While demanding her reward:
The jellyfish kiss.
Now we checked out this duck quack
Who laid a big egg, oh so black
It shone just like gold.
And the kids from the city,
Finding it pretty, took it home,
And there it was sold.
It was changing hands for weeks till someone left it by their fire
And it melted to a puddle on the floor:
For it was only a candle, a Roman scandal oh oh oh,
Now it's a pool.
That's what we're paid for
That's what we're paid for
That's what we're paid for here.
Lyrics submitted by mint_melody, edited by PaulMad
Fat Lady of Limbourg Lyrics as written by Brian Eno
Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group
Lyrics powered by LyricFind
Add your thoughts
Log in now to tell us what you think this song means.
Don’t have an account? Create an account with SongMeanings to post comments, submit lyrics, and more. It’s super easy, we promise!
More Featured Meanings
The Night We Met
Lord Huron
Lord Huron
Magical
Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran
How would you describe the feeling of being in love? For Ed Sheeran, the word is “Magical.” in HIS three-minute album opener, he makes an attempt to capture the beauty and delicacy of true love with words. He describes the magic of it all over a bright Pop song produced by Aaron Dessner.
Head > Heels
Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran
“Head > Heels” is a track that aims to capture what it feels like to experience romance that exceeds expectations. Ed Sheeran dedicates his album outro to a lover who has blessed him with a unique experience that he seeks to describe through the song’s nuanced lyrics.
American Town
Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran shares a short story of reconnecting with an old flame on “American Town.” The track is about a holiday Ed Sheeran spends with his countrywoman who resides in America. The two are back together after a long period apart, and get around to enjoying a bunch of fun activities while rekindling the flames of their romance.
Page
Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran
There aren’t many things that’ll hurt more than giving love a chance against your better judgement only to have your heart crushed yet again. Ed Sheeran tells such a story on “Page.” On this track, he is devastated to have lost his lover and even more saddened by the feeling that he may never move on from this.
One of the more Dada-esque offerings from a songwriter whose early career is typified by heaping helpings of the absurd. Like "The Great Pretender"--also on Side A of the Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) LP--there's a woozy sense of nasty dealings underfoot, despite not much of a "smoking gun" in sight. One might labor to locate a specific element obviously over-the-top in terms of cruelty or perversion.
Ah, but the description (in the second verse) of the Fat Lady of Limbourg! Close enough. The couplet:
But her sense of taste is such that she'll distinguish with her tongue The subtleties a spectrograph would miss
...matches anything in "Seven Deadly Finns" for weirdness (followed up by an image truly nausea-inducing, if one thinks too hard about it). Either track would be a fine benchmark for Eno's playful perversity, most of which he--perhaps sadly--seems to have gotten out of his system, ultimately. Except for the odd bits of oddness on Side A of Before and After Science: the luxuriant wordplay of "Backwater" and the 'pataphysical madness of "King's Lead Hat". (These tendencies would crop up on My Squelchy Life, but only occasionally. An opinion based, of course, on those few tracks which ever saw legitimate release.)
My knowledge of world history being neither deep nor wide, nevertheless I've noticed how Eno enjoyed making obscure references to pre-Modern Europe on Taking Tiger Mountain. There's the prominence of Limbourg, a city (located in what's now Belgium) of little significance today, but which once had been a great fortress. Intended, perhaps, to underscore the Fat Lady's faded ties with royalty. In a similar vein, Eno's protagonist of "Mother Whale Eyeless"--in yet another unlikely image--finds himself "plugging holes in the Zuider Zee." That body of water (spangled with zeds!)--once prominent in the map of the Netherlands--has vanished. This changeable (not to say "fluid") feature of the Dutch landscape is kept alive in memory by the Zuiderzee Museum (and by Eno's song).
@foreverdrone She's tasting Opium. Read my post.
Cool song.
If you'll recall, about 99% of Eno's music is without lyric. There's a reason for that. Brian Eno always believed that lyrics restricted the scope of meaning to a song and he said himself that most of his lyrics are for the purpose of rhyming and on the occasion, not the norm, he writes them for meaning. I love Fat Lady of Limbourg, one of my favorite songs from the album, but I honestly don't think it's lyrics have any hidden, underlying meaning. It's just a fun story.
When it comes to "Here He Comes" from Before and After Science, while I suppose anything can be interpreted to one's liking, given Eno's bisexuality and my homosexuality, I find it very easy to believe that it's about cruising.
The one album that I think while simplistic in it's great songs and great lyrics which tell an individual story for each song is Wrong Way Up with John Cale.
JMO!
Pantucci is a bakery in Switzerland and Argentina, Luchi is a type of bread, the duck's black egg is a Chinese dish. If it helps you in any way.
I like this song a lot. It seems, like most of Eno's songs, to sort of laugh at organization and boundries. He's always blissfully transcending language, but in this song specifically he seems to be poking fun at government/police organizations. In the end, the men are paid to go on a huge investigation only to find a melted duck egg. How absurd!
It's about the creative process. From the thought in the artist's mind - through the shredder of the production companies - until the customer sees the poor result, far from what was intended.
Really. I had to make an account for this. Ugh. I thought for sure one of you would have picked up on the real meaning of this song. While I agree with some of what is written, I can remember as a Youth [ or yute]. growing up in NYC and speaking with friends about this song. It was unanimously agreed upon, Eno is actually talking about Opium. I guess none of you smoked opium before. Or, mainlined it. It is the best high. I mean, if I'm wrong, let Eno tell me I'm wrong. Like wrong, wrong, hahahaaaa. You smoke it, it melts down. You shoot it, you have to mix it down. Black opium in quantity used to come looking like an egg. A big black egg. Not like Hash, which was like a shoe sole. Hope that cleaqrs things up a bit. Yep. I was smoking Opium as a teen. I'm 61 now. Drugs didn't kill me, obviously. Hahahahaaaaaaaaa. Luego,
Lentle covers very much of the proper meaning. A "jellyfish kiss" is a shot of heroin. "Changing hands for weeks" definitely a drug.