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Jesus Christ, girl
What are people gonna think
When I show up to one of several funerals
I've attended for grandpa this week
With you
With me
Someone's got to help me dig
Someone's got to help me dig
Jesus Christ, girl
It hasn't been long so it seems
Since I was picking out an island and a tomb for you
At the Hollywood Cemetery
You kiss
On me
We should let this dead guy sleep
We should let this dead guy sleep
Jesus Christ, girl
I laid up for hours in a daze
Retracing the expanse of your American back
With Adderall and weed in my veins
You came
I think
Cause the marble made my cheeks look pink
But I'm unsure of so many things
Someone's got to help me dig
Someone's got to help me dig
Someone's got to help me dig
What are people gonna think
When I show up to one of several funerals
I've attended for grandpa this week
With you
With me
Someone's got to help me dig
Someone's got to help me dig
Jesus Christ, girl
It hasn't been long so it seems
Since I was picking out an island and a tomb for you
At the Hollywood Cemetery
You kiss
On me
We should let this dead guy sleep
We should let this dead guy sleep
Jesus Christ, girl
I laid up for hours in a daze
Retracing the expanse of your American back
With Adderall and weed in my veins
You came
I think
Cause the marble made my cheeks look pink
But I'm unsure of so many things
Someone's got to help me dig
Someone's got to help me dig
Someone's got to help me dig
Lyrics submitted by casiopt10
Track duration: 03:11
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"You came, I think, because the marble made my cheeks look pink"
In crass terms he was, uh, pressing his face up against the marble floor for so long while burying it into her uh, thang, that his cheeks looked pink from the pressure of the floor afterwards. But he's unsure of so many things, because he was effed up and perhaps, you know, she was uh, faking it... etc....
"But I'm unsure of so many things
Someone's got to help me dig"
It's simple language, but it adds such a powerful dimension to the song.
Sex has no definite state like death and a cemetery is the perfect place to expose yourself to the anxieties surrounding the big D. Sex in this setting amplifies its archaeology of the soul. When I die I might request an orgy in my honor, atop my tombstone. Father John Misty will preside hopefully.
He revealed that this song is about flying to Baltimore for his grandfather's funeral and shortly thereafter having a tryst at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
What are people gonna think
When I show up to one of several funerals
I've attended for grandpa this week
With you
With me
Here I think he's saying to this girl that she's insatiable and perhaps they they go somewhere else for a bit because someone is going to notice that they keep showing up to all these funerals, day after day.
Jesus Christ, girl
It hasn't been long so it seems
Since I was picking out an island and a tomb for you
At the Hollywood Cemetery
You kiss
On me
He's saying to her, "we haven't been together that long because it was just the other day I was picking out that tomb we made out it in the first time."
We should let this dead guy sleep
We should let this dead guy sleep
Jesus Christ, girl
I laid up for hours in a daze
Retracing the expanse of your American back
With Adderall and weed in my veins
You came
I think
Cause the marble made my cheeks look pink
But I'm unsure of so many things
Here he's remembering that first time when he just laid there afterwards, as high as he could be and he was obsessed with her back. Just lost in the details and exploring it's intricacies. He doesn't remember much about that first time though.
I think the lines "Someone's got to help me dig" might be referring to how a relationship is not built by just one person, it takes two. He's asking her to help him dig or work on this relationship.
I remember in an interview a few years back, as J. Tillman, the interviewer asked him what themes he saw running through the album he was touring, and he said, "Just, you know... death." And the people in the room laughed, and the interviewer joked about how that was so uplifting (sarcastically, of course) and Josh shrugged and said, "I think it is." He went on to talk about how the idea of the afterlife kind of substantiates our lives in a figurative sense, not a literal sense. It was an interesting little speech he gave, but it really does go to show that death is that one red thread running through everything he writes, whether in an uplifting way (like Year in the Kingdom) or a macabre way (like this). So his writing style has changed, and the sound of his music has changed, but the thoughts that stand behind all of his work still rings true. (To me, at least.)
The first verse seems to be about having to attend his grandfather's funeral alone, revealing that he and his lover are no longer together to his family "what are people gonna think". He expressed how close they were with the line "with you, with me" meaning that he had hoped for them to spend their life together, resulting in them being buried together with his family. The line "someone's got to help me dig" is him expressing her absence in the burial of his grandfather.
The experience triggers a fond memory that he sings about in the second verse. A memory of him and the lost lover making love in the hollywood cemetery and fantasizing that they could one day be famous enough to be buried there. When he says "we should let this dead guy sleep" he is speaking about whoever was underneath them while it happened.
The third verse goes into more detail with him reminiscing about that experience. The "marble" he refers to is the headstone. And his cheeks looking pink is a representation of how alive he felt when they were still together, despite being in a cemetery.
He again sings "someone's got to help me dig" but this time he seems to be referring to their break up and how it was like a death to him.
Whichever is the case, he is still committing to being with her, alive or dead, even as he fears her intensity and the way he can't seem to separate himself from her influence. He is unnerved by her manic behavior and disregard for the distinctions between the mores of the living or the death--ie, "What are people gonna think?" and "We should let this dead guy sleep"--but at the same time it exhilarates him. Furthermore, when he sings, "Jesus Christ/I laid up for hours in a daze/retracing the expanse of your American back/with Adderal and weed in my veins", to me he seems to be attempting to articulate that push/pull, love/hate, life/death tug of war within himself, especially since his tone and inflection suggest a mixture of reverence and uneasy self-loathing. In being with her, he's ridden and possibly still is riding the rollercoasters of her emotions and indulges(ed?) her in her craziness both because it's sexually stimulating and because it allows him to stand on the edge and stare down into his own personal oblivion without quite tipping over into it...yet.
Whether or not the woman he pines for has passed away in the literal sense or whether he simply knows that at some point he's going to have to make a difficult choice between saving himself at her expense in order to live a less confusing life, or embracing his own death in order to be closer to her now that she's gone, I feel like the essence of the song is the same. It's fitting that the French call orgasms "la petit mort", or "the little death", and it certainly seems to apply here. It's possible he is truly mourning her loss after she has passed on, dealing with his grief by writhing against and jacking off on tombstones in the cemetery where she is buried in spite of the humiliation of people seeing him there so often he can no longer easily explain away his presence. If she's alive, he is simply a troubled man distracting himself with a woman whose problems far outweigh his own.
Either way, sex and the physical indulgence of his body are the only things that bring him comfort as he stumbles through his life wondering what, if anything, to do next. Finally, I love that for me, the line "someone's gotta help me dig" can be interpreted to mean any of the following: 1) That he wants to continue to dig the two of them deeper into his/their own dark, twisted hole so that they can be free of the prying looks of people that don't understand them; 2) that he is literally so crazed with grief over losing her that he wants to dig up her body and hopes other people will leave him alone with her corpse and his memories; or 3) he views her as the perfect partner even as she frightens him, because she is the only one willing to dig with him down into the darkest, dirtiest recesses inside him and then soothe and protect him from them with the comfort of her body.
So, yeah. I could be way off, but that's what I get out of it so far. It may be about sex in graveyards, death, and/or obsessive love or grief, or it could be that the past and present are so overlapping and intertwining for him that he simply can't tell the difference, and subsequently neither can we. I think that's what makes the song so arresting and worthy of many, many listens.
Sorry.
First, the tone of the song would make no sense. The song is kind of sad and serious and wouldnt make sense if he were just talking about how they should stop having sex in graveyards.
Second, sex doesnt even come up until the last stanza. If the whole song is about sex it should have been introduced at the very beginning to provide context. Only one verse talks about sex, it seems a mistake to then think the whole song is about it.
Third, whats with the repetition of "someone's gotta help me dig" if the song is about banging on graves? And why is he picking out a tomb for the girl, and why is he reflecting on the fact that he picked out a tomb some time ago? In general why the focus on past tense in the song? This suggest that the song is reflective, not about something likes to do with his lover.