| Damien Jurado – Museum of Flight Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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"It's not that easy / when you get burned / and go on burning light" This is my favorite lyric in the song. It's a smart play on the word "burn" - burning light, as in a candle, means to remain light and positive. Beautiful way of phrasing how it's hard to "burn light" after you've suffered pain. |
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| Blake Mills – Don't Tell Our Friends About Me Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| Interesting! I interpret it as about him lashing out at his girlfriend and regretting having said something really cruel, at least from what I gathered from the first verse | |
| The Belle Brigade – My Goodness Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| This song sounds like it's about losing your integrity and trying to reclaim it. They have a Simon & Garfunkel-esque way of making heavy issues fun to listen to. Deep stuff! I love it! | |
| Vampire Weekend – Worship You Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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I listened to Ezra talk about this song on BBCR1 and he said, "Overall, the lyrics of 'Worship You' are about kind of believing in something, whether it's a religious belief or a political belief, putting all your faith and then coming to this other point where you start to question it. [...] The idea that there's something that you worship, that you totally leaned on, and then you kind of had to think twice, it left you, it went away, and then you were kind of back on your own for a second." As others have said, I think that the song is partly about God, but I think it has an ambiguity that allows you to also interpret it as about political figures (perhaps Barack Obama) who betray what you expected of them. |
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| Blake Mills – It'll All Work Out Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| This was released in the same time frame as "Hey Lover" which is his song for Danielle, so I don't think that last bit's about her, but I love how you phrased this as a "torch of inherited struggle"... great insight | |
| The Avett Brothers – February Seven Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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There's a theme of sleeping, dreaming, and waking throughout this one: "When I awoke, you were standing there." "There's no falling back to sleep once you've wakened from the dream." "Now, I'm rested and I'm ready to begin." I don't think specifics (such as addiction or adultery, as others have suggested) are relevant unless the songwriter actually mentions or implies them in the song. The writer (which is Scott, in this case, as the Spotify commentary would tell us) includes the details that matter. I think this song is about maturing, and transitioning from the bad habits of youth and becoming an adult. Once you realize the truths that dawn on you as you grow older, you can't go back to thinking the way you used to. ("There's no falling back to sleep once you've wakened from the dream.") At the same time, the last line of each verse emphasizes that someone has been loyal to him throughout his emotional relapses and shortcomings (the variations of "I awoke and you were standing there"). So I think it is also about being grateful for someone who has loved you at your worst as well as your best, and the importance of loving someone that faithfully. My favorite line in this song is "the light broke in and brought me to my feet". Seth's harmony on that line is absolutely heartrending. I kind of wish it were "YOUR light broke in and brought me to my feet" :) |
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| Death Cab for Cutie – Bixby Canyon Bridge Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I think this song is about Ben Gibbard's "last bender" before he stopped drinking. In an article with the Guardian, he said, "I gave up drinking three years ago after a trip where I tried to "recreate" the novel Big Sur. I could see how On the Road was all about not having a care in the world, allowing the long nights and excesses to define you in the positive the way most people do when they're young. But Big Sur was the proverbial end of the road, and it showed me how that kind of lifestyle can end in alcoholism. There's footage of Kerouac at the end of his life when he's a horrible drunk and really embittered; I found myself in literally the same place, staying in a cabin he'd stayed in and knowing how it ended because I had read the book. Big Sur is the most beautiful place in the US, but when you're in a disturbed emotional state the vastness of it was upsetting — it felt like evil spirits were lurking there. I've been back to that cabin a number of times and once again it looks beautiful, and I wonder how I could ever have felt so unsettled." I think he's talking about following Kerouac's footsteps ("All the way from San Francisco / As I chased the end of your road / 'cause I've still got miles to go") before realizing that he doesn't want to end up in the same place that Kerouac ended up, and at the low point of his trip to Big Sur, he's starting to see that he's going to ruin himself if he keeps drinking, but futhermore, if he keeps living the reckless "college kid" life all the way through his adulthood. ("And I want to know my fate / if I keep up this way.") The line about how it's "hard to want to stay awake" when everyone else is asleep is drawing on the concept of being the guy staying up late drinking while your settled-down peers are at home in bed with their spouses, and applying that image to those comparative lifestyles in general. When you admire someone like Kerouac to the point of emulating them, you're bound to emulate their mistakes - and as he [Ben] reaches that point, he realizes that this is the person he wants to emulate at all, though he's also "no closer to any kind of truth", implying that he no longer knows what kind of person he is or wants to become. I think that's a killer closing line. |
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| Dawes – Hey Lover Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| Dawes just covers this song, it's originally by Blake Mills | |
| Father John Misty – I Love You, Honeybear Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Cynics attract. Find someone who shares your dark view of the world and the darkness becomes irrelevant. (About his girlfriend, Emma, who stars in the "Nancy From Now On" video. It's sweet to see/read him talk about her in interviews, because he does kind of seem obsessively in love with her.) |
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| Rodriguez – Crucify Your Mind Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| This song is on par with the lyrical genius of Leonard Cohen. It's unbelievable that he didn't achieve similar renown... | |
| Haim – Better Off Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| I like that all the songs they've released so far have had a common theme running through them - they're continuing the story of this on-again-off-again relationship. You can tell she's being honest about her love life and not just making shit up. | |
| The Avett Brothers – Geraldine Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Interesting interpretation! I was wondering if maybe "Miss Progress" was a cross-dresser. Or perhaps "Miss Progress" is just a liberal woman in a conservative town, making her a target for "homophobic gentlemen" (oxymoron? ha) because she isn't homophobic like others in such a conservative town. He falls in love with her, and this is a bit rebellious, because she is not the traditional girl-next-door in town - she's a progressive woman in a black dress. I hope they speak about this song in an interview sometime, I'd love to know what they had in mind. |
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| Father John Misty – Nancy From Now On Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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What Tillman told Matt Pinfield at MTV Hivecast about this song: "It's one of those things that I wrote in the first few months of basically blowing up my life and moving. It's breezy, but it has that 'punch me in the face' stuff. That's just how I felt. That song is just about destroying everything - destroying your identity, destroying your body, destroying your reputation - with casual looks back." My question is... what's his "symbol"? ;) |
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| Joanna Newsom – Soft as Chalk Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I love the musical landscape of this song The slow simple chords of the first three verses kind of denote what I interpret as passive-aggression and the creeping scorn she feels for her lover. The drums picking up the pace at the fourth verse is where her true feelings come to the surface and she begins to stop disguising them. The shift at "and I feel you leaning out back with the crickets" denote the chaos (or rather, "lawlessness") that quickly ensues as the lovers turn on one another; the music and her voice both are somewhat wild and therefore express a kind of anger. The the instrumental is where it dawns on her that breaking up is inevitable, until she reaches the verse where she's speaking about the black bear, where she expresses fear and paranoia and confusion. She goes on to say that her sadness is "beyond anger and beyond fear" - anger and fear, respectively, being the driving emotion of the previous two movements, and thereby the previous two emotional phases she felt about the disintegration of her relationship. The grief in knowing that their love is gone, overshadows the anger and fear she had felt. The last movement is her picking herself up again and decidedly ending the relationship with clarity and logic, wishing him well instead of parting ways on bad terms. |
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| The Avett Brothers – When I Drink Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| Crackerfarm posted a video of Seth visiting the Martin Guitar factory back in March and in it, he talks about his solo record, The Mourning, The Silver, The Bell; he says that the mourning is the realization that something tragic has happened, the silver is something flashy that catches your eye - something you mistakenly interpret as a tool to overcome the mourning, and the bell represents clarity. It was cool to see him discuss it aloud, as I'd been wondering about the phrase ever since I heard it. | |
| Dawes – The Way You Laugh Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| That is one of the best closing verses ever. Such a good lyric. | |
| Dawes – Time Spent In Los Angeles Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Outside the LA area, people assume that Los Angeles is all Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, which is like assuming New York City is all Upper East Side and Park Slope, with no Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. They don't think of the smog and the traffic and the crime and the greed and superficiality of LA, so knowing that "outsiders" view LA as some kind of dream place is disenchanting for anyone who's spent time there - you know that everyone's idea of Utopia is entirely misleading, and so you know better than to think Utopia exists. I think when Taylor Goldsmith sings about "that special kind of sadness, that tragic set of charms", he's referring to that disillusionment. In the lyrics, he says that when he tells people he's from Los Angeles ("to see what that says about a man"), it misleads people - he grew up in North Hills, which is definitely not the Beverly Hills image some people would get in their heads. North Hills is in the San Fernando Valley nestled between a bunch of freeways, which is what I think of when he says "it's something written in the headlights". I think it embitters people from LA when others assume they've grown up with everything handed to them. I think when he says, "I used to think someone would love me for the places I have been," he's saying that he used to hope someone would fall in love with him in spite of him being from LA, and that he'd be appreciated as someone who works hard ("and the dirt that I've been gathering deep beneath my nails"), not as someone who's had everything handed to him. When he meets this girl, he sees in her what he loves about home, not of the outsider's idea of Los Angeles, and it drives him to go back and recreate Los Angeles for himself ("and I'm going home to make it mine") instead of subscribing to the outsiders' misconception. |
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| Father John Misty – Tee Pees 1-12 Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| *Also: "put my MEMBER behind glass" | |
| J. Tillman – When I Light Your Darkened Door Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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I was listening to Leonard Cohen's Bird on the Wire, and there's a lyric, "[I saw] a pretty woman, leaning in her darkened door / She cried to me, 'Hey, why not ask for more?'" I've read that Tillman's a Leonard Cohen listener (he also played a cover for MOJO's The Songs of Leonard Cohen Covered), so I wonder if perhaps he took the phrase from that song. I think of "Bird on the Wire" as a redemption song, or forgiveness song, written through the perspective of a guy who feels like he's fucked everything up. So it's cool to think about, that maybe this song was written to kind of continue on the relationship of those characters - a beautiful woman offering herself to this guy who considers himself to be unworthy and good for nothing. If you think of it like that, this song is like his inner dialogue, and his self-doubt in thinking that this woman doesn't know who she's looking at, that the "darkened door" refers to her not being able to see him clearly for who he is. |
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| Conor Oberst – Big Black Nothing Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| This track wasn't written by Conor, as the disclaimer at the bottom suggests. I understand it being on Conor's page, being Mystic Valley Band, but it's Nik Freitas singing and Nik Freitas is the one who wrote it. | |
| Jenny Lewis – Just Like Zeus Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| On KCRW, she dedicated to "all you people out there, out at Promises and Betty Ford Center" which are both luxury rehabilitation centers in southern California. (By luxury, I mean they're insanely expensive.) That's what she's saying in that line, "ninety days at Promises with no booze." | |
| Monsters of Folk – Temazcal Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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I think this was inspired by being in Mexico with the Mystic Valley Band. The hammock line ("swinging in the hammock") made me wonder, because I remember them saying that there was a hammock on every porch where they were staying. Valle Mistico is located in the Tepoztlan Valley ("the dancing in the valley"), and the references to Mayans and Temezcal certainly suggest that he's talking about Mexico. Like someone above said, "OVNI" is basically Spanish for UFO, and Tepoztlan is said to have a lot of UFO sightings. I'm not saying that the song has anything to do with an experience with the Mystic Valley Band, but I definitely think the imagery was inspired by it. |
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| Father John Misty – Tee Pees 1-12 Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| "Trout Fishing in America" is a novella by Richard Brautigan. That's what he means by, "by the time I got around to reading the book". | |
| Father John Misty – Now I'm Learning to Love the War Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| In an interview a few months ago, he said something about the realization that nothing can be created without destroying something else. At the time, I think he was talking about "destroying" J. Tillman to create Father John Misty, but it made me interpret this song differently. I think the "war" he's talking about it just that - destroying something to create another. He goes a lot deeper into that in this song, talking about the decomposition of things, how everything is made from particles as old as fuckin time itself, and how everything that makes up what we are and everything we own will eventually recompose into something entirely different. That's what makes the line, "I sure hope they make something useful out of me." I think that's what he means by "learning to love" this whole cyclical process - feeling that as useless as you are, maybe after you decompose, those cells will become part of something better than anything you ever were. It's a little depressing, but I guess when you're in a depression like he was, that kind of thinking is how you turn your morbid thoughts around. So the way he phrases the title, "NOW I'm Learning to Love the War" - it's as though he's finally coming to peace with his obsession with death. He's getting out the pit of depression he spent crazing over insignificance. Probably the best track on the record. It definitely has the strongest theme running through it. | |
| Father John Misty – I'm Writing a Novel Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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I believe it's, "you can't turn nothing into nothingness with me no more". My favorite line on the record is, "cause I'm surrounded on all sides / by people writing novels / and living on amusement rides". (Now, he's started saying "and living lives that look like mine.") |
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| Father John Misty – Everyman Needs a Companion Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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"I never liked the name Joshua, I got tired of J..." It totally gutted me that he ended the album like that. Basically what the whole Father John Misty thing is about: self-loathing, self-deprecation, self-frustration, and realizing how selfish it is to have all that emotion directed at no one but yourself. |
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| Father John Misty – Well, You Can Do It Without Me Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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I've wondered about that. He wrote it quite a while ago and performed it at Origami Vinyl, definitely while he was still in Fleet Foxes, so I still have some doubts that he would have stuck around so long after feeling this way, but I don't think the song is about an old flame, and the whole line about "if they tell you you're a genius but you need some proof" definitely sounds like it could be directed at Robin, since he's such a perfectionist and has so much self-doubt. They've said in interviews that Robin has a hard time finishing a song, because he never thinks it's good enough even though everyone else says it sounds great... that goes for the "nobody that's around you seems to get it right" line. So it's possible. I don't think anyone would ever acknowledge it publicly, though, out of courtesy... |
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| Father John Misty – Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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Tillman's stated in plenty of interviews that his dad kind of summoned him to his grandpa's funeral, after having missed all the other grandparents' funerals, and how he was kind of sickened by how funerals commemorate people's lives in such a shitty, lifeless way. Later, he was making out with a girl (the blogger from imboycrazy, which they both stated personally on her podcast) in a graveyard on Halloween and how he thought to himself, "This is such a better way to commemorate someone's life. My grandpa's favorite thing was probably fucking my grandma, anyway." So this song IS about sex, really, and he's stated that this album is a conscious effort to NOT make the "sexless male fantasy" album that every other artist is making, and how he intends to be upfront about liking sex and drugs and mischief. (All of which appear in this song, so it makes sense that he would release this track first.) 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.) |
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| Father John Misty – Funtimes in Babylon Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| Yeah, it's "everything in sight" and "knee-deep in blood". That's how they're written in the lyric sheet. He says them a little more clearly in live performances. I thought it was "inside" and "knee-deep in blood" at first, too. | |
| Bright Eyes – Cleanse Song Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| this is my favorite song these days. "what you need is some laughter, and a season to sleep, and a place to get clean" - it's so sweet to hear him sing like this, being kind to himself instead of self-loathing. he's said that he left cassadaga feeling really peaceful, which makes me wonder if that feeling inspired the orchestrations for this - the flute and the oboe are so different from what he'd used before (and what he's used since). i feel like the oboe kind of has a sweet-sorrow sound, and the flute is so graceful, which makes them work so beautifully with the line "here the chimes, did you know that the wind when it blows, it is older than rome, and our joy, and our sorrow." mentioning the chimes kind of gives me the image of him standing on some porch listening to the windchimes and thinking through all this and kind of stopping to take a breath while he has this moment of clarity. so beautiful. so perfect. | |
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