submissions
| Tahiti 80 – The Train Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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This song has this really sad mood in the music even though it's fairly upbeat. It's like "uhhh whoops ignored my awesome girlfriend and now she's gone...fuck." |
submissions
| Arcade Fire – Neighborhood #2 (Laika) Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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The bro sounds like the guy that all the neighbors gossip about. Thanks for the clarification on Laika, special3lend. That makes it a lot more clear. Neat little reference. |
submissions
| The Decemberists – Oceanside Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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He wants to do her on the beach! Okay I guess that's all I can say about it. These guys are such staggeringly good storytellers, the song really speaks for itself. |
submissions
| Arcade Fire – Wake Up Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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Yeah, you grow up and you see the adults around you repressing things, not talking about the things that haunt them -- and that's just wrong. It just breeds more pain.
I love the end of the song. It's like, when my hour is up, I don't want to have any leftover shit on my mind, I just want to be right there and happy with my life.
Fucking great song. |
submissions
| Arcade Fire – Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles) Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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The passage of time is moving through the time, he's watching the various motions of love and hate that pass through a town. Time is sort of this inevitable, creeping thing that keeps getting steadily hotter. Modernization is coming in, radio, cars, all these symbols of adulthood, progress, etc., - and something gets lost in all of that. He doesn't want sex, he doesn't want religion (things that people seem to run to when shit gets heavy), he just wants that old feeling back, you can't rush these things with modernization. Just got to let them grow. But these days we're all watching our pots and they're just not boiling. |
submissions
| Arcade Fire – Une Annee Sans Lumiere Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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Such a lovely song. I just take it to mean, the boy's eyes are making all this light and commotion and it's casting shadows of the girl. The dad won't acknowledge them, he's just pretending it doesn't exist, that it means as little to him as it does to the horse. But the shadow is proof that the light is real, and he can't ignore that for long! |
submissions
| Arcade Fire – Crown of Love Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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I was thinking of all the different things this song could be about. Commitment, sex, parental approval, all three...I dunno. I picture a scenario about a couple who's having sex out of wedlock but is scared to commit to engagement, and the guy makes some big mistake somewhere in there and is now sort of struggling with it.
Fucking great song. |
submissions
| The Postal Service – This Place Is a Prison Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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I relate to this song a lot, being from a town I've felt stuck in since I was little, waiting to get out of here and live on my own.
The place he's describing is like a black hole, people just get sucked in trying to dull their pain, they try to glamorize the things that are killing them, that keep them stuck. It's like we're afraid to move on, move out, we may be dying slowly here but at least it's familiar. The unknown can be fucking scary.
At the end of the song he's through thinking of leaving, it's just put the fear back in him, and he goes back to the drink like everyone else. Sad song. |
submissions
| The Postal Service – Clark Gable Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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It's like this idea that if you adhere to the right standard or form, if you have the classic kiss or the right line, if everything's perfect and staged, then your love is 'real' and 'truthful'...and I think the narrator is just realizing how crap that whole idea was and is just getting it out of his system.
Like the last few lines - "the fear your perfect verse is just a lie you tell yourself to help you get by." That instead of figuring out why we can't love what we have, we go chasing effigies of perfection and we take lines from songs and characters from movies as the mythological ghost ships that we chase -- and maybe it's comforting to just get lost in that chase when we can't find the love we're looking for. |
submissions
| The Postal Service – Recycled Air Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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I think Jimmy Tamborello needs more props for his PS work, especially this song. His instrumentation captures the weird woozy feeling of take-off so perfectly.
I like the idea of a parallel to a first relationship or sexual encounter. He's nervous and here he is, breathing recycled air, part and parcel of this created, synthetic world. He becomes docile as the song goes on ("calm down, release your cares") and the instrumentation changes as well. It becomes less jarring and woozy, more tranquilizing, ethereal almost.
It's like he's transitioning from sickly anxiousness into total bliss - and total bliss is very chill, but it's still tastes a bit stagnant. So the parallel with a sexual encounter works really well. |
submissions
| The Postal Service – Such Great Heights Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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Beautiful song. I love the intertwining of love and faith in the first verse, it's so rare that somebody remembers that religion is about loving the people around you and being a good person, not blowing up other countries and abortion clinics and such. There's more holiness in the love you give to others than there is in any kind of violence, and Ben recognizes that here. Love shared draws the eyes of divinity.
That's a really rare thing, which is the idea of the song - most folks don't have that. The rest of the world is all "wtf are you doing" but this love they share puts things in a much better perspective. |
submissions
| The Postal Service – Nothing Better Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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I didn't think it portrayed Jen as a bitch though. She's trying to protect herself from getting hurt again, and not be drawn in by his presence, which attracts her despite herself. But Ben is obviously pretty clingy and desperate in this situation. The "revisions and gaps in history" make me think that, Jen says it as though he's omitting all the mistakes he's made and just sifting out the idealistic parts. And "I swear I'll never wrong you again" is a bit of a big promise, y'know? I think strong love is built on the acceptance of mistakes, not huge false promises. The guy is desperate, and the girl is torn by her emotions but is sticking to her guns with the logical side of things. I don't think there's any goodguy/badguy. |
submissions
| The Postal Service – Sleeping In Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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I think he's going to his dreams to escape the complexity of modern life. There's so many weighty consequences and unexplained phenomena everywhere, in history, science, all that. There's so much conspiracy and controversy over how JFK was killed; there's so much debate about global warming, its effects, its causes.
In the dream he's looking at all these things that we get wound up in and his dream world is a little more innocent - he can take everything at face value, and the facade of the warm, pleasant society we live in is totally real instead of totally false. And the fantasy and security of that thought is something he wants to prolong by staying asleep. |
submissions
| The Postal Service – We Will Become Silhouettes Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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Definitely playing on a nuclear scenario. But I think it's really life-affirming in a way, and the tone of the song matches it. It's like, either I can stay down here where there's nobody, I'm all by myself wallowing in my memories and sadness - or I can just go outside, take in the world for a moment and then be on my way to spontaneous combustion. It would mean coming to terms with death, choosing one good last look at life and accepting your fate instead of just holing yourself up and trying to stop the inevitable. |
submissions
| The Postal Service – Natural Anthem Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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This seems like the anthem behind all of Ben's lyrics. It's like he's describing all the songs he writes - the choruses resound, the names and places are taken from real life, and they've got his biased slant on them.
But taken on its own, to me personally, it's a love song that goes beyond the sentiment of Brand New Colony, which is very much about being with the person alone, getting away from it all, protecting them. This is more about how that person inspires you to do some good and be a positive force. |
submissions
| Failure – Stuck On You Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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It's like when you're calling some place and they put you on hold and you hear that fucking catchy song they use for phone music and it gets stuck in your head for days. |
submissions
| Death Cab for Cutie – We Looked Like Giants Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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Yeah it seems like he's torn about cheapening the idea of love by cutting class and fucking in the car. But he holds her closer, and that seems to be the unifying line of the song. Like the sex is this obvious secret that everyone can plainly see, but the love they shared at the time is a very private thing that nobody really knows about. |
submissions
| Death Cab for Cutie – The Sound of Settling Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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I thought of it like settling, like when the settlers came and started their cities in the west. There's so many DCFC songs about people moving around the country that it came to mind that way and it made sense to me. Though the other sense of the word hadn't occured to me until reading this site. |
submissions
| Death Cab for Cutie – Styrofoam Plates Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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This is one of the most brilliant songs ever written, in my opinion. You know you're listening to a gifted songwriter when he can write such a personal song, with so many specific details -- and yet you can feel his pain so thoroughly, echoing your own. Fucking mindblowing. |
submissions
| Death Cab for Cutie – Information Travels Faster Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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Great ending, too. Just think of all this crap we have now, email, instant messaging, cell phones. It doesn't actually make anything better, just faster...and it makes our lives seem even slower by comparison. |
submissions
| Death Cab for Cutie – Blacking Out the Friction Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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Really like this song, and I agree with royspider for the most part. Escaping your home or losing yourself in drink (I always took 'blacking out the friction' to mean that, seems like a great phrase for getting drunk) isn't going to solve any of your problem, and it's stupid to think so -- the person in the song is just going to end up hauling their ass across America all by themselves and that's all they'll get out of it. |
submissions
| Death Cab for Cutie – A Lack of Color Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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"All the girls in every girlie magazine..."
That's a great line. The porn doesn't make you any less lonely. None of the shit we try to distract ourselves with does. |
submissions
| Death Cab for Cutie – Passenger Seat Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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Yeah, this is a really rare feeling he's describing. The kind of feeling you don't really think anybody will ever capture in a song - but here we are. |
submissions
| Death Cab for Cutie – Transatlanticism Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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It's the indie creation myth. The world is opening up for everybody, but for him it's not creating new pathways, it's destroying his old ones to the person he wants to be with most.
I end up relating to this song alot since my gal goes to school on the opposite coast and I miss her a ton. Great song. |
submissions
| The Blood Brothers – Beautiful Horses Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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Television and politics are inseparable nowadays.
The girl in this song is just living this dumb vicarious life, it's totally empty, it's not hers, and before she knows it she's just exhausted and a total failure because she's lived all the greatest moments of her life through a television. |
submissions
| The Blood Brothers – Feed Me to the Forest Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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It reminds me of how after the World Trade Center got leveled, my school didn't decide to cancel class or homework or anything. We just kept on trucking so as not to miss our academic standards or something. And it was like, is a few thousand people getting sneak-incinerated not a good enough reason to give the kids a break? I guess not. The song just seems to be about how nothing means enough for us to stop and think about it anymore, we seem to think we have to keep moving like cogs. |
submissions
| The Blood Brothers – Devastator Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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Very political. Also another one about the media influence. The television media has been the conduit for our current administration singing and dancing about why we need to run into other countries and totally devastate them. They're trying to keep us entertained, to captivate us into following them. A lot of ugly imagery in the song - because war is an ugly thing, and 'Devastator' is totally shameless about being the instigator of that.
"Death campaigns are a fucking gold mine."
This line absolutely reminded me of the current presidential administration's shady ties to oil money and such. |
submissions
| The Blood Brothers – My First Kiss at the Public Execution Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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Yeah, just adding to what's already been said. Another song that builds on the album's theme of life being so inundated in television and what that says about humanity. These days we're mixing the emotion of love and the voyeuristic perversion of watching someone die. |
submissions
| The Blood Brothers – Crimes Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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Makes me imagine two guys with shitty jobs, shooting the breeze about robbing the liquor store, the mayor, the widow. Seems like fantasizing. They're poor and cast aside, just like the kids in the subway. Either they're committing crimes of their own volition, or their fate is a consequence of a greater crime -- either way their situation is fucked. |
submissions
| The Blood Brothers – Love Rhymes with Hideous Car Wreck Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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I think "biodegradable hands" like "newspaper gown" is a reference to her social status. Nitsirhc may be fresh off the playground but he makes a good point about homelessness. A rich girl with a tit job and a tan probably has nice hands, moisturizes them often, whatever. |
submissions
| Interpol – Leif Erikson Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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I don't know about that, seeing as Interpol is from New York.
I agree with bamargero's take. The song didn't make much sense to me until looking at it in that light. |
submissions
| Creeper Lagoon – Wonderful Love Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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Sweet song. The guy is so in love with the girl, and not for any extraordinary supernatural qualities. Just her everydayness. Seems like it's someone who really he really gets along well with. |
submissions
| Creeper Lagoon – Wrecking Ball Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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No comments? Wow. Okay, well, this song always seemed to me to be about a really emotional fragile girl who the guy is afraid to get too intimate with or close to because it'll hurt her. Like, maybe about a girl who just left a bad relationship and is falling for this new guy despite herself. |
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