The Past And Pending

In general, this song is about saying goodbye. A lot of people have already suggested that this song is about breaking up, and that is a valid interpretation. However, I will be going with the interpretation of love lost as in the the death (or anticipated death) of a family member, friend, or significant other. I'll explain why I think so by highlighting the important parts of the song:

The song opens up with a reference to autumn. Autumn is generally associated with old age and decline, with the coming of winter as death. "We settle down to cut apart" refers to the the act of preparing to say goodbye. The specific scenarios I imagine the song being applicable to would be something like other family members sitting by the bedside of a terminally ill relative, or simply an aged couple settling down, mulling the how quickly life has passed and becoming anxious about their remaining time together.

"Cough and twitch from the news on your face" means the sudden realization of regrets, and the inevitability of death now that it is so close at hand. "Foreign candle burning in your eyes" - you know that saying, "Oh that person has a faraway look in his eyes?" When someone is so caught up and lost in their thoughts, it's like they're gazing into the distance...like they're looking into the foreign lands of their mind. This ties in nicely with the "Lose yourself in lines dissecting" part, as I will mention later.

"Held to the past too aware of the pending." You want to cherish the times spent together. But the fond act of remembrance is tainted by the dark certainties of the future. It's always something at the back of your mind, that someday it'll all end.

"Your name on my cast and my notes on your stay." Those left behind, they suffer as broken people. And the cast they wear during the healing process bears the name of their lost loved one. The "notes on your stay" simply mean memories of time together--the only thing left.

"We've turned every stone and for all our inventions, in matters of love loss, we've no recourse at all." Pretty self-explanatory. We live in modern society, with apparent solutions to a formidable amount of technological, scientific, and rational problems. Nonetheless, each of us as an individual can be utterly crippled by the emotions of sorrow due to lost love. It is absurdly easy how vulnerable we are in some respects, despite how far we've come intellectually.

And of course the most poignant line: "Loiter the whole day through and lose yourself in lines dissecting love..." The way Mercer repeats it and softly fades out, you literally get lost in the song... And you'll notice a nice scene in the music video of the freeway overpasses interlacing as "lines dissecting" the sky. Anyway, this relates to my earlier interpretation of "foreign candle." Just thinking so much, having that lost look, dissecting and analyzing the situation, mulling over the past, whatever. It's that flurry of thoughts and thinking and overthinking things that makes you lose time without even knowing it.

I wasn't able to do a complete line-by-line analysis, but I think the rest of the song kind of falls into place. Plus if you watch the music video (youtube.com/watch), it seems to be about a grandson and his grandfather spending quality time together. The grandson is taking pictures, "being held to the past." Perhaps because they are both "too aware of the the pending," no words are ever exchanged between the two during the video.

The theme of this song is the transience of the people we love in our life. Eventually we all have to say goodbye, whether it be a temporary one or the final goodbye. I know I've focused on the final goodbyes in this analysis, but the song is consistent with milder interpretations. So something even about a student going off to college, leaving their best friends and family--that goodbye is applicable as well.