This is a hauntingly beautiful song about introspection, specifically about looking back at a relationship that started bad and ended so poorly, that the narrator wants to go back to the very beginning and tell himself to not even travel down that road. I believe that the relationship started poorly because of the lines:
"Take me back to the night we met:When the night was full of terrors: And your eyes were filled with tears: When you had not touched me yet"
So, the first night was not a great start, but the narrator pursued the relationship and eventually both overcame the rough start to fall in love with each other:
"I had all and then most of you"
Like many relationships that turn sour, it was not a quick decline, but a gradual one where the narrator and their partner fall out of love and gradually grow apart
"Some and now none of you"
Losing someone who was once everything in your world, who you could confide in, tell your secrets to, share all the most intimate parts of your life, to being strangers with that person is probably one of the most painful experiences a person can go through. So Painful, the narrator wants to go back in time and tell himself to not even pursue the relationship.
This was the perfect song for "13 Reasons Why"
One, two, three, five,
The night is only half alive
The curtains blow the frightened tress,
They line the moonlit windy beach
Four five six seven,
My dreams never touched on heaven,
They come, they stream they laugh they bleed,
They drop me off in a thicket of reeds
Keep the dream alive
A boy, a dog, the dunes, the sea,
He stands in a thicket of reeds,
No food, cell, or GPS,
I watched him weeping from the trees
"The sea is only half alive,
Help me find my campsite," he said
Keep the dream alive
I dreamed he found his way back there,
The campsite though was stripped out bare,
The night was only half-alive
Skinned raccoons hung from a line
For men there is no turning back,
They all had left with coonskin caps,
The embers smoked and barley glowed,
He gathered wood and started his own fire
Keep the dream alive
The night is only half alive
The curtains blow the frightened tress,
They line the moonlit windy beach
Four five six seven,
My dreams never touched on heaven,
They come, they stream they laugh they bleed,
They drop me off in a thicket of reeds
Keep the dream alive
A boy, a dog, the dunes, the sea,
He stands in a thicket of reeds,
No food, cell, or GPS,
I watched him weeping from the trees
"The sea is only half alive,
Help me find my campsite," he said
Keep the dream alive
I dreamed he found his way back there,
The campsite though was stripped out bare,
The night was only half-alive
Skinned raccoons hung from a line
For men there is no turning back,
They all had left with coonskin caps,
The embers smoked and barley glowed,
He gathered wood and started his own fire
Keep the dream alive
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after experiencing jv and his band come down into the middle of the crowd to sing this song at the middle east upstairs in boston in september 2008, i definitely want to keep the dream alive.