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How I lost my boy
How I lost my boy
How I lost my boy
How I lost my boy
The king in I died
He kept floating past my eyes and singing his songs
Life was good now death's all wrong
Cause you can't feel a thing
No heart flutters in late spring
You just drift and pray for sun-kissed golden days
And I can't hold what's in my hand
Don't do any good to say this isn't what I planned
And little kids sliding down the steel park slide
Little kids can't play with things that died
Sometimes all I want is one favorite song
And two to three minutes don't seem so long
And where's my mom I want to hold her tight
She's so far away from crowded nights
I'm going cuckoo cuckoo
We're all going cuckoo cuckoo
We're all going
I said please stay
You can see me, don't go away
I can't see the landscape
Please describe its amaranthine haze
It's odd where I am
They're people you're not like them
They just look away for rain-quenched golden days
And my tears quench five feet along
And I can scream but cannot yawn
And people gonna come and people gonna cry
We just hope it's worth the age we die
Don't try to erase what you have done
Put your fingers in a mouth and kiss it if it wants
And where's my friend, I want to hold him tight
he's so far away from mountain light
I'm going cuckoo cuckoo
We're all going cuckoo cuckoo
We're all going
I can't hold what's in my hand
Don't do any good to say this isn't what I planned
And little kids sliding down the steel park slide
Little kids can't play with things that died
Sometimes all I want is one favorite song
And two to three minutes don't seem that long
And where's my mom I want to hold her tight
She's so far away from crowded nights
I'm going cuckoo cuckoo
We're all going cuckoo cuckoo
We're all going
How I lost my boy
How I lost my boy
How I lost my boy
The king in I died
He kept floating past my eyes and singing his songs
Life was good now death's all wrong
Cause you can't feel a thing
No heart flutters in late spring
You just drift and pray for sun-kissed golden days
And I can't hold what's in my hand
Don't do any good to say this isn't what I planned
And little kids sliding down the steel park slide
Little kids can't play with things that died
Sometimes all I want is one favorite song
And two to three minutes don't seem so long
And where's my mom I want to hold her tight
She's so far away from crowded nights
I'm going cuckoo cuckoo
We're all going cuckoo cuckoo
We're all going
I said please stay
You can see me, don't go away
I can't see the landscape
Please describe its amaranthine haze
It's odd where I am
They're people you're not like them
They just look away for rain-quenched golden days
And my tears quench five feet along
And I can scream but cannot yawn
And people gonna come and people gonna cry
We just hope it's worth the age we die
Don't try to erase what you have done
Put your fingers in a mouth and kiss it if it wants
And where's my friend, I want to hold him tight
he's so far away from mountain light
I'm going cuckoo cuckoo
We're all going cuckoo cuckoo
We're all going
I can't hold what's in my hand
Don't do any good to say this isn't what I planned
And little kids sliding down the steel park slide
Little kids can't play with things that died
Sometimes all I want is one favorite song
And two to three minutes don't seem that long
And where's my mom I want to hold her tight
She's so far away from crowded nights
I'm going cuckoo cuckoo
We're all going cuckoo cuckoo
We're all going
Lyrics submitted by CaseyEclectic
Track duration: 05:44
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"How I lost my boy"
This sets up the theme for the song. His "boy" is his inner child, which also represents his curiosity and enthusiasm about life, which he feels he has lost. This theme is present throughout the song, and Strawberry Jam as a whole is very much about the transition between childhood and adulthood.
"The king in I died
He kept floating past my eyes and singing his songs
Life was good now death's all wrong"
Avey is once again referring to his inner child here, except he uses the word "king" instead of "boy". He used to be able to feel a connection with his inner child when it would "float past his eyes" and "sing songs", which basically is just a poetic way of saying he used to feel his inner child's presence in his head. "Life" refers to the period of time that he felt a connection with his inner child, and "death" refers to the psychological death he has experienced where he can no longer feel that connection.
"Cause you can't feel a thing
No heart flutters in late spring
You just drift and pray for sun-kissed golden days"
He can't feel a thing, because his inner child (which represents his enthusiasm and feelings) is gone. "No heart flutters in late spring" basically reiterates his lack of feeling, and I imagine it was the period of the year that he was going through this psychological episode. "You just drift and pray for sun kissed-golden days" refers to the feeling of "drifting" or not feeling connected, and just wishing that he could go back to the days that he had true feelings.
"And I can't hold what's in my hand
Don't do any good to say this isn't what I planned
And little kids sliding down the steel park slide
Little kids can't play with things that died"
He "can't hold what's in his hand" because he is psychologically "dead" and does not feel connected to the outside world. It doesn't do any good to say that it's not what he's planned is pretty self-explanatory, it doesn't matter if it wasn't what he planned because he's already stuck in the "dead" mindset. "Little kids slide down the steel water slide" is just an observational statement about something he sees, and that sight brings about the thought that's represented in the next line "little kids can't play with things that died." This once again represents his lack of connection to his inner child, he is psychologically "dead" so his inner child can't "play" with or interact with him.
"Sometimes all I want is one favorite song
And two to three minutes don't seem so long
And where's my mom I want to hold her tight
She's so far away from crowded nights"
These lines represent things that might help him feel connected again. His "one favorite song" makes him have those feelings again, but it "don't seem so long" and the feelings fade away afterwards. He then longs for his mother, but she is "so far away from crowded nights" or in other words, she lives far away from the city where Avey lives, which I believe was NYC.
"I'm going cuckoo cuckoo
We're all going cuckoo cuckoo
We're all going"
Pretty simple, because he is psychologically "dead" he feels as if he is going crazy. He looks at the world around him and feels equally that "we're all going cuckoo cuckoo". "We're all going" could be subtle change that indicates that we are all becoming psychologically "dead" or unfeeling, or "going"/leaving, but it also could just be a line to end the chorus.
"I said please stay
You can see me, don't go away
I can't see the landscape
Please describe its amaranthine haze"
These lines could relate to the theme of the song in two different ways. He could be asking his inner child to "please stay", because he knows that his inner child is still inside of him, or in other words his inner child can "see" him, but once again he's not longer connected to his. He asks his inner child to describe the "landscape" and it's "haze" which means his inner world or subconscious which he no longer feels connected to. These lines could also be him asking an external person to "please stay" and to describe the "landscape" or the external world around him because he doesn't feel it anymore either.
"It's odd where I am
They're people you're not like them
They just look away for rain-quenched golden days"
It's odd in his current "dead" state, where he is. When he sees "they're people" or "they are people" he refers to the people outside who still have identities. When he says "you're not like them" he's talking to himself and describing his current state of being "inhuman"; this state is also mentioned in "For Reverend Green". The people are always longing for their "golden days" like he is however.
"And my tears quench five feet along
And I can scream but cannot yawn
And people gonna come and people gonna cry
We just hope it's worth the age we die"
His "tears" or his emotions "quench five feet along", or in other words they are short-lived and he keeps returning to his feeling of being "dead". People are going to come and cry, or in other words, people are going to exist and suffer, and they just hope it's "worth it" when they finally die, or they hope that they feel fulfilled when they die. This is pretty much a nihilistic observation that he's making from his disconnected state.
Don't try to erase what you have done
Put your fingers in a mouth and kiss it if it wants
And where's my friend, I want to hold him tight
he's so far away from mountain light
When he says "you" he's talking to himself again. He's saying don't try to "erase" or pretend that he didn't bring himself to this current state. He then sort of talks down to himself and tells himself to basically kiss his boo-boo and feel better, "put your fingers in your mouth and kiss it if it wants". The next lines re-express the feelings of longing for his mother, except the feeling of longing is directed at a "friend". who he feels is "so far away from mountain light"; basically, Avey feels that his head is sort of up in the clouds and he feels distant from his friend on a psychological level.
So that's what this song really expresses, the psychological feeling of "death", and not feeling connected to anything, whether it be the external world, his inner child or his inner world. These themes can be traced throughout Strawberry Jam, like in Fireworks when he longs for the curiosity that the babies feel when they are watching the fireworks explode overhead.
Please comment, I want to hear what other people say about this theory.
Also, one thing I'll say is that at the end the King dies, and Anna(the love interest) rushes over to him and holds his hand. But he is already dead, explaining the lyrics "I can't hold what's in my hand." That was a surprise to get that explained in the very last seconds of the movie.
I think most of the interpretations on here are pretty damn good.
I think there's also something of self-isolationism and going crazy over that.
"Where's my mom?" / "Where's my friend?"
He misses the people in his life and wants to be reunited.
Or the favorite song part. He misses all the things in his life that he had. Music, and friends, and just everything. Because he's run off into the mountains or something like that, gone to be alone, but regretting that decision.
But like I said, I think it's about all kinds of things, that's just how I've always thought of it.
You will most likely witness your mother passing during your own lifetime, I at first thought the first bit was that, her watching as she left her son, but I'm second guessing it to be his perspective.
"How I lost my boy
How I lost my boy
How I lost my boy
How I lost my boy
The king in I died
He kept floating past my eyes and singing his songs
Life was good now death's all wrong
Cause you can't feel a thing
No heart flutters in late spring
You just drift and pray for sun-kissed golden days"
First bit would be about passing from his younger self in time. He lost the boy in him; haven't thought out how literally it could be called the king in him because I don't yet want to apply that perspective to the whole song, but that's my thought. Either way life being considered positive would make death the opposite, you can't feel a thing, and as you drift towards your end in time you wish you were young again, so it kind of ties within the idea of losing his younger self. Kind of existentialism, you can't go back to where or who you were, time changes permanently.
"And I can't hold what's in my hand
Don't do any good to say this isn't what I planned
And little kids sliding down the steel park slide
Little kids can't play with things that died
Sometimes all I want is one favorite song
And two to three minutes don't seem so long
And where's my mom I want to hold her tight
She's so far away from crowded nights"
You can't keep the world, you can't take anything with you, either in the long term sense of ownership of something during life, or when crossing the horizon of death. The little kid lines are cool; could be that he's lamenting his inability to play with kids, as a kid, as that part of him is gone, or that death takes away people that would otherwise play with them. This line also gives a lot to the miscarriage idea, but I'm avoiding that perspective to present my own (not that it isn't applicable). Enjoying a favorite song makes minutes blow by (songs are, in my opinion, a cooler way to measure one's time than conventional measurement like minutes. Doesn't apply to interpretation, just sharing a thought), again playing up that you can't reclaim time. His mom's out of his life the way she was in it when he was a child, she's moving along time, too, at the same distance, which is edging towards the end. "She's so away from crowded nights" could be a reference to her isolation from people at her age, she can't hang out anymore.
"I'm going cuckoo cuckoo
We're all going cuckoo cuckoo
We're all going"
I like that "we're all going" sounds more like a line than cuckoo cuckoo, which sounds more incomprehensible, because "we're all going" alone would apply to the direction of my interpretation. Going cuckoo is crazy, ya? I guess we all are too. Not a well developed idea on my part.
"I said please stay
You can see me, don't go away
I can't see the landscape
Please describe its amaranthine haze
It's odd where I am
They're people you're not like them
They just look away for rain-quenched golden days"
So yeah, back to the mother idea with this a bit. Please mom, don't go. Describe to me what life looks like closer to the end, what's the view from that end of the timeline? At his age people are looking back on the better times they've had. Maybe she's at the point where she turned around, could turn her back on the past to look ahead and see death full on. Maybe he can't see death yet, he's trying but is too far, is afraid to, or doesn't understand it. Think about a person's timeline, imagine them standing in a desert, walking slowly to the horizon. You could look back and see how far you've traveled, or forward. The haze has cleared for her enough to see the wall, since it's nearer.
"And my tears quench five feet along
And I can scream but cannot yawn
And people gonna come and people gonna cry
We just hope it's worth the age we die
Don't try to erase what you have done
Put your fingers in a mouth and kiss it if it wants
And where's my friend, I want to hold him tight
he's so far away from mountain light"
He's been contemplating mortality for around five feet of his desert journey. He can scream out, but can't be bored, he knows he hasn't the time to. The third line is a play off "people gonna come, people gonna go", you're gonna cry when they go, you just got to hope that the suffering of life has been worth experiencing what you love and who you love. I'm getting lazy with literally interpreting the rest of the lines, I can't make them out directly for this. But I get a sense of carpe diem. "Put your fingers in a mouth and kiss it if it wants" Maybe this means clutch onto someone (by the mouth mind you) and kiss them if they want. That and the next line are pretty much to love people as you meet them, your friends might be gone, you'll miss them.
There's my take, thanks if you read it. I love this song.
For anyone who's ever had it, these lyrics are dead on for how it feels - hence also the title of the song, Cuckoo Cuckoo. It can often come on suddenly after tripping, never fully returning to reality in a sense. You feel like reality, emotion, everything is just torn away from you and like you'll never be normal again. Inner-death as he's putting it here. Ego-loss too, it's ALL there.
I could list quotes, but its basically the entire thing. It is about dp/dr.
"And I can't hold what's in my hand
Don't do any good to say this isn't what I planned"