This Tornado Loves You

indeed, the tornado IS meant a literal one (as Neko insists) but her playful resistance against metaphor throws us into a dichotomy, pitting us against the forces that run throughout this album: Nature and Nurture.

hudsucker's point is well-taken; Neko IS smart and this song is an extension of her "I don't write love songs" attitude... but Neko's resistance, strangely, reinforces the metaphor... in love and, especially, in love songs, we like to think in metaphors.. so a straightforward interpretation of this song would a man who is running away from a destructive relationship, hiding from a crazy, obsessed woman

but taken literally, we get a picture of love that is absurdly comic: a funnel of wind searching for its love, who is in hiding.. then we think 'how is this possible? a tornado loves?' -- for we know what happens when we love it and "come into the light" to meet it: we are gone, vaporized or smashed up like the transformers and trailers... thus, love becomes a hunt, a tragically sad and empty one ("carved your name across three counties," the path of destruction "sixty-five miles wide")..

the agony of unrequited love fuels the tornado's chase, but this obsession ultimately reveals a relationship in flight ("your rails have always outrun mine"), an escape from love's entrapment and disintegration... by the end of the song, "he" is safe from harm, "still warm and breathing"; our pained heroine/tornado is left alone and crying "What will make you believe me?"

as soon as we begin to laugh at this, we realize we've been thinking in metaphors all along... (have we been conditioned into thinking in metaphors? -- the "nurture"?) to love a tornado, we have to be prepared to die with it -- right? .. but, love as death, as a tornado, is the very thing we resist, and run away from...

thus, love becomes "literal" in this song.. it IS Nature -- formidable, destructive, unrelenting as IS the cyclone's eye...