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Load the car and write the note.
Grab your bag and grab your coat.
Tell the ones that need to know.
We are headed north.
One foot in and one foot back.
But it don't pay to live like that.
So I cut the ties and I jumped the tracks.
For never to return.
Ah Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in.
Are you aware the shape I'm in?
My hands they shake, my head it spins.
Ah Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in.
When at first I learned to speak.
I used all my words to fight.
With him and her and you and me.
Ah, but it's just a waste of time.
Yeah it's such a waste of time.
That woman she's got eyes that shine.
Like a pair of stolen polished dimes.
She asked to dance I said it's fine.
I'll see you in the morning time.
Ah Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in.
Are you aware the shape I'm in?
My hands they shake, my head it spins.
Ah Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in.
Three words that became hard to say.
I and love and you.
What you were then I am today.
Look at the things I do.
Ah Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in.
Are you aware the shape I'm in?
My hands they shake, my head it spins.
Ah Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in.
Dumbed down and numbed by time and age.
Your dreams that catch the world the cage.
The highway sets the traveler's stage.
All exits look the same.
Three words that became hard to say.
I and love and you.
I and love and you.
I and love and you.
Grab your bag and grab your coat.
Tell the ones that need to know.
We are headed north.
One foot in and one foot back.
But it don't pay to live like that.
So I cut the ties and I jumped the tracks.
For never to return.
Ah Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in.
Are you aware the shape I'm in?
My hands they shake, my head it spins.
Ah Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in.
When at first I learned to speak.
I used all my words to fight.
With him and her and you and me.
Ah, but it's just a waste of time.
Yeah it's such a waste of time.
That woman she's got eyes that shine.
Like a pair of stolen polished dimes.
She asked to dance I said it's fine.
I'll see you in the morning time.
Ah Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in.
Are you aware the shape I'm in?
My hands they shake, my head it spins.
Ah Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in.
Three words that became hard to say.
I and love and you.
What you were then I am today.
Look at the things I do.
Ah Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in.
Are you aware the shape I'm in?
My hands they shake, my head it spins.
Ah Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in.
Dumbed down and numbed by time and age.
Your dreams that catch the world the cage.
The highway sets the traveler's stage.
All exits look the same.
Three words that became hard to say.
I and love and you.
I and love and you.
I and love and you.
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sachem_head wrote:
Another Song Lyric Analysis: "I and Love and You" by the Avett Brothers
“Load the car and write the note,” the song "I and Love and You" by the Avett Brothers begins. It’s an imperative: we’re going. What’s not clear here is who the speaker is speaking to. But we’re grabbing our bag and coat, perhaps traveling light, but with a sense of purpose. We’re telling “the ones who need to know.” So maybe we’re going to be gone for a while. People might miss us. But we’re not telling everybody. Just the ones who “need to know.” Why is that? A hint of trouble? Or mistrust? Or just urgency: don’t bother telling everybody, just a select few.
So the song is a song of leaving, a song of departure. And where are we going, for now, it’s just “north.” That vague direction compass has a mythical feel to it. North verses south. After the first verse, it changes. And we’ll see that all the verses are loosely connected like this. In the second verse, we get an explanation. The speaker has been living “one foot in and one foot back.” That is, noncommittal, looking in both directions, cautiously. “It don’t pay,” he decides, so he “cut[s] the ties” and jumps “the tracks / for never to return.” That is, he’s going for it, going all in. He’s going to take the risk.
And then we move to the chorus, where he sings, “Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in.” There is a little confusion for me here in these lines, or was – I think maybe I’ve resolved it for myself. I thought first that Brooklyn was the place, that Indie capital of the east coast, the place of authenticity, the grittier borough to Manhattan, the one on the rise. But then I thought maybe Brooklyn was a woman. It has become a fashionable woman’s name. I didn’t like this interpretation, but he does address Brooklyn like a person. And it adds a beloved to the lyric. But then I’m back to Brooklyn the city, being sung to like a lover. Take me in. “Are you aware the shape I’m in?” Bad shape, need to be rescued, need a safe harbor. “My hands they shake my head it spins,” which suggests addiction or a hangover, but could be metaphorical. But whatever it is, it’s bad shape.
Then we move back. “When at first I learned to speak / I used all my words to fight” – this is a sort of origin myth. A bad childhood? Or the speaker was a tough when he was younger? It seems like an evolution toward being a songwriter, the writer of a lyric. Someone who “used all my words to fight” is now writing a song, a lyric, words to bring people together or to explain feelings or to court a beloved. The earlier way was “a waste of time” – perhaps this is also parallel to the break with the past in the second stanza. Maybe this fighting past was holding the speaker back just like the caution.
Then, in the fourth verse, we get the beloved. “That woman she’s got eyes that shine / Like a pair of stolen polished dimes” – wow, what a line. She’s beautiful, but beautiful in such an earthy way. Her eyes shine like a pair of stolen polished dimes. They’re dimes first, which is not terribly expensive. They don’t shine like priceless jewels, but they are metal. Then they’re stolen – which gives some sense of the illicit, maybe suggesting something about the woman? Or the relationship. And finally, they’re polished. If the speaker has stolen the dimes, he’s polished them, they are precious to him, or if she is the stealer, if there is something outlaw to her character, she is also polished, sharp, composed, put together. It’s an image that really arrests you and pulls you in to consider.
Then we get their relationship. “She asked to dance I said it’s fine / I’ll see you in the morning time.” This is a little ambiguous. My sense is that maybe it means she came on to him and he replied confidently and nonchalantly. Sure, I’ll dance with you, and I’ll also be spending the night with you. There’s a cocksureness there, in that interpretation. But it could also be the opposite. “It’s fine” could be a polite way of saying no, but I’ll see you in the morning. I lean toward the first, but it’s not 100 percent.
This is all we get of the relationship. Who is this woman? What is her place in the larger situation of the song? Is she the “you” who the speaker is asking along with him? Or is he fleeing her?
“Three words that became hard to say,” he sings. “I and love and you.” Which is an artful way of saying, it became hard to say I love you. But why does he rearrange them? Just to make it more artful, more pretty? Or is this more than saying I’ve fallen out of love with you, or I can’t commit, but I’m not sure I’m capable of love – not just with one woman, but with anyone.
“What you were then, I am today,” he sings. Who is the you here? It’s interesting, because this is the first time that “you” in the song is used explicitly as a second-person address. In the first verse, we have an implied you – the speaker is talking to someone. And earlier in the fifth verse, we get the word “you,” which again implies a you, but grammatically, it avoids saying it. He could be talking to anyone there. He could be telling someone else that he had troubles mouthing those words, not necessarily the person he had troubles saying them to. So “you” could be a guy friend, a travel buddy, or it could be the beloved, the woman with eyes that shine. If it’s a buddy, it is someone sympathetic, someone who has been there before.
There’s actually an echo to Neil Young’s “Old Man” – “Old man, take a look at my life, I’m a lot like you.” He says, “Look at the things I do.” So the you here is someone he’s explaining himself to. I’m not sure how to read that as the beloved, unless he’s admitting he’s wrong and wanting her back.
In the sixth stanza, we get philosophical. “Dumbed down and numbed by time and age” -- we get a song of experience, a song of departure, and here the speaker is now imagining himself older and wiser. But not that that’s a good thing. He’s less vital, less bright. He feels less. But then he reveals something which to me places another meaning to the whole lyric. “Your dreams to catch the world, the cage.” These are the dreams of a performer, an artist. An indie band trying to make it. What’s not clear is if the cage is an ironic way of commenting on these dreams. They are themselves a cage. Or if it hints back at the escape of the first verse. To break out of the cage. Or both. “The highway sets the travelers stage / All exits look the same.”
In the end, I think of this song through what I know of the band’s biography. Originally from North Carolina, the Avett Brothers had released a half a dozen albums and several more EPs before I heard "I and Love and You" on the radio. Brooklyn, here, is the capital of hipsterdom. And the song seems to be about making it as a band. The "stolen polished dimes" is in some way a reflection on success. Maybe "that woman" is a siren. And maybe the cage is the dream itself, the dream of making it. The three words that became hard to say are not just about love, but also about sentimentality or about authentic feeling.
I relate very much to this song, given a recent breakup with (who i thought was) the love of my life. When I met her I was struck by how brilliant, beautiful, and talented she was... but as we aged through our relationship and I grew to love her and her to love me, it became increasingly obvious that something was off..I knew when we met that she was recovering from a 3 year relationship (her first attempt at love) that ended abruptly when her boyfriend left her.
It took me months to open her up--a process that owes itself entirely to my patience, energy, and belief in the woman she could be--but when I finally did, I realized that she was determined to maintain the distance that guaranteed her own emotional safety. Despite my best efforts to assure her that our relationship didnt have to end like her past--that WE controlled our own fate!--she eventually broke up with me because she just couldnt bring herself to let her guard down and believe in me the way she had romantically been swept away when she was young and naive and first attempting this thing we call love. What she didnt realize was that she was doing to me exactly what had happened to her. She had been broken by her first experience with love, and continues to allow that negative experience to disrupt any chance at a second attempt. And now, I look at myself and realize she, in turn, has left me broken.
While Poshboy is very close, this is how I would interpret the song:
First two stanzas, rightly interpreted, are about leaving his past behind and traveling to someplace new. He writes the notes to those who he feels would worry about his disappearance, but is too (ashamed, cowardly, or just plain broken?) to talk to them personally.
"Brooklyn brooklyn take me in..."
He's praying with all his might that the new city to which he travels will allow him to escape his past and rescue him from his current state of being.
"When at first I learned to speak.
I used all my words to fight.
With him and her and you and me.
Ah, but it's just a waste of time.
Yeah it's such a waste of time."
This is a nostalgic moment in which he ruefully remembers a time before his experience with love, back when he was young and carefree, living in absolutes and believing that life was about drawing the boundaries between human distinctions--perhaps a time when, like many of us, he believed humanity to be separate and immune to one anothers decisions and choices. But he recognizes that this line of thinking is a waste of time, and that something else is of much more importance and value to a fufilling life...
"That woman she's got eyes that shine.
Like a pair of stolen polished dimes.
She asked to dance I said it's fine.
I'll see you in the morning time."
Music picks up, and the abrupt transition in subject tells you that THIS is what the song is all about. He's remembering the woman thats made him all that he is today. He remembers her as a elegant being with sparkling eyes, who one day in that all-to-distant past asked him to dance and from then on changed his life forever. He may at some moment even have had expected to see her in the morning like he used to, only now thats clearly not the truth... Brooklyn instead is here to comfort his woes...
And FINALLY: this song's chorus speaks so eloquently the words that remain the refrain to my love life. No matter where I travel to escape my past, I'm left with the feeling of emptiness from the loss of perhaps the greatest woman I've ever known. The words "I love you" are now words that I find almost painful to be spoken. Im like her. Unwilling... or unable... to allow myself to open to another.
"What you were then, I am today. Look at the things I do."
It's just that she had a bad experience like your girl did. Before much ever happened between us (though I had known her a year and a half, and had around 6 months of getting to really know her), she started distancing herself and was clearly afraid of letting something happen. To boot, I was very unhappy with myself at the time, and I felt like she was the only one that could take me in and make me happy with myself. And I just wanted to make her happy.
It's just that I had apparently reminded her of her abusive ex-boyfriend, and I never got a chance. I never did anything to her, but she got trapped in her head about it and just shut me out. I watched her slip away from me and seem like she hated me, and I hated myself too. Soon after she told me the truth (not in person, because she didn't trust me), I was still normal on the outside I guess, but I was miserable in my head and when I was alone. I was depressed and just didn't know what to do. I had never met someone that made me feel like she did, and I had never wanted so badly to be validated by someone whom I felt I could make truly happy. I had never been willing to just drop everything and do whatever so I could be with a girl. She was just better than all the girls I had ever met, and I couldn't control myself. I still see her everyday (college... not due to choice), and this all started almost a year ago. Around when you posted this comment was the end of the major depression and me helplessly trying to get a chance with her. I was angry for a few months, but eventually asked for forgiveness. I'm still embarrassed at the way I was pathetic and depressed and said a lot of dumb things to her, but I can't change any of it. We're friends and act normal around each other I guess, but I know that I've given her plenty of reasons to not want to be around me.
I had no way of handling the fact that she just let go of everything after seemingly validating the idea that I had a reason to really like her. I thought she really liked me. And the idea that I was similar to someone that hurt her so badly just killed me on the inside for a long time. If you're crazy about a girl and she tells you you're similar to a piece of shit, it's hard to just ignore the feeling that you really are one. I really hated myself for awhile. Even if I knew I did nothing (and had a friend back me up that I never did the thing she said I did), it still just made me feel guilty and even angry at her, all when I just wanted to see that smile of hers every day, and be the one that made it the brightest. I felt different about this girl in a way I had never felt, and I was just a dark spot. I haven't really thought of this in months, but your comment rang home a bit. I guess there's a part of me that wishes I could have a chance with her, but I know I can't. I also know that I'll probably never be able to even be a real friend that she wants around. I've accepted that fully, and I've been fine for close to 6 months about all this.
It's just that there's a part of me that wishes I could have gotten to this day without all the pain. I wish she could trust me and actually want me around, but I know I'm shit to her on some level, even if she would never say that. She was always too nice to call me out. I've never been one to get attached to anyone, perhaps because part of me is afraid, but also because I'm just a particular person. I just wish I knew how to find someone that could make me feel like she did. I wish I could be in love with someone who loved me back. It's hard to be open to someone when you've had something backfire so devastatingly hard on you. It's hard to act like you don't still want that person deep down or that you don't wish you actually meant something to them. It's hard to accept that you won't even mean something to them.
Yes, it is a general song of regret and family failure and sickness and despair, but it is specific to Woody Guthrie's story... "Brooklyn (state hospital) let me in..."
Thats what it means to me. And I absolutely love this song. It's the soundtrack to my fall.
"When at first I learned to speak. I used all my words to fight," could mean fighting with parents and siblings, or whomever, for as long as you can remember. This was something you needed to get away from, because it never has gotten you anywhere. On the road you meet some girl you party with, but she doesn't keep you from your goal.
And it's hard to say, I love you, to those people in your past that put you down and you always fought with. They liked reminding you what they were doing at your age, why you were seemingly just a bum or whatever. By going to Brooklyn you're showing them you're motivated and have goals too. But in the end maybe you are just a wayward bum, and you don't really know what you're doing with your life. Hence, why you keep travelling, trying to find somewhere you can call you new home.