"Hot, red, and soaking wet" is the face of someone who's been crying.
Wrestling a lion has been a metaphor for confronting something vastly more powerful than you since at least the book of Daniel. The details of this particular confrontation aren't all laid out here, but there's more than enough to get the sense of it: the fear, and the reality, of being overmatched, and the sense of terror and helplessness that comes when you realize you're not going to be able to hold on any longer, and the thing you've tried to conquer will smite you.
At least, when I had this confrontation with my own father, that's pretty much how it played out. Most of what I get out of the songs on The Sunset Tree is the shock of recognition.
My girlfriend and I saw Darnielle give a talk the other night in San Francisco, and someone asked about his family's reaction to his autobiographical songs, and he said, "My mother said, 'Your stepfather did a lot of good things, too.'" We just laughed about this afterwards. My mom would totally say that about my dad, and I've actually heard her mom say almost exactly the same thing about her stepfather. Yeah, he did a lot of good things too. Keep believing that makes things okay, Mom.
"Hot, red, and soaking wet" is the face of someone who's been crying.
Wrestling a lion has been a metaphor for confronting something vastly more powerful than you since at least the book of Daniel. The details of this particular confrontation aren't all laid out here, but there's more than enough to get the sense of it: the fear, and the reality, of being overmatched, and the sense of terror and helplessness that comes when you realize you're not going to be able to hold on any longer, and the thing you've tried to conquer will smite you.
At least, when I had this confrontation with my own father, that's pretty much how it played out. Most of what I get out of the songs on The Sunset Tree is the shock of recognition.
My girlfriend and I saw Darnielle give a talk the other night in San Francisco, and someone asked about his family's reaction to his autobiographical songs, and he said, "My mother said, 'Your stepfather did a lot of good things, too.'" We just laughed about this afterwards. My mom would totally say that about my dad, and I've actually heard her mom say almost exactly the same thing about her stepfather. Yeah, he did a lot of good things too. Keep believing that makes things okay, Mom.
"Yeah, he did a lot of good things too. Keep believing that makes things okay, Mom."
"Yeah, he did a lot of good things too. Keep believing that makes things okay, Mom."
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
Yeah, that's pretty much it.