submissions
| The Distillers – I Understand Lyrics
| 20 years ago
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I read it as a troubled childhood/addiction song. Maybe how her troubled childhood/adolescence led her to heroin addiction. She had a "junkie heart" to start with, then there's a "shift", she kicks dope and "stopped taking hits" (of heroin), her "eyes start to flicker" after years of being glazed over from being high, and her "mouth starts to drip" after all that time with dry-mouth, which you get from taking heroin, but even so, she still realizes she's "bound" to the drug. she realizes that after years of being numb from dope, she still "can't feel"...
or maybe it's about somebody she had a relationship with who introduced her to heroin, who "planted the seed" and their whole relationship was based around the drug, so when she quits, she feels there's nothing else substantial to the relationship, or that because of the nature of their relationship, it can't continue now that she's clean, "what can i do when I'm bound like this with you". and that she "cant feel" anything for him now?
...just quesses, but i say its a safe bet it's about heroin addiction anyway, with the junkie heart and the part about the eyes and mouth. |
submissions
| The Distillers – I Am A Revenant Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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I think it's more about having gone through something terrible, where someone somewhere did something to cause her a lot of pain, either emotionally or physically or both. the references to wounds and blood leaving a stain suggests abuse possibly? unless it's metaphor for severe emotional abuse. from someone who makes her "despise" the "year you walked into my life", and who caused a lot of "rage" and "hate" on her behalf. But "Another year's gone by" and she "licks her wounds" and "as the years go by I won't cry" meaning she's toughened up with time, healed her wounds, and now will "rise up from the dead" and "reclaim" the "breath" that was "stolen" from her. And as breath is something we have a right to, as she says in seneca falls "i don't steal the air i breathe", she is standing up from the ashes and rightfully claiming what was taken from her, whether it be dignity or self-esteem or whatever else that had crippled her before. |
submissions
| The Distillers – Hidden Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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I actually kinda prefer this version to the full version on sing sing. i mean, i love the rest of the lyrics on sing sing, but the way she plays and sings it here, a little slower, and rawer, and more strained and pained and visceral and heartfelt somehow, i love it. |
submissions
| The Distillers – Gypsy Rose Lee Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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I think there's a little bit of a darker, bittersweet side to this song than just two young girls playing dress-up... I have a feeling she wrote "Young Girls" about the same friend-Gertie Rouge, or someone similar? there are fond memories of being young interspersed with tragedy and going through tough shit as they're older. I think this was around the time Brody got into heroin, and probably with her best friend. The "pink lacquered skies" might be similar to seeing the world through rose-colored glasses, except the pink comes from the pink rocks of heroin, and seeing the world through that glaze. And when her "eyes go through that tunnel" might refer to when they constrict when she's high. Obviously there are some hard times referenced here, with "too many nights Lost in space, I remember kneeling down, Oh my knees caught in the ground" like she's praying for her friend in a way, "you gotta save your soul". And at the end, having been through the good times together as kids and the hard times together later on, "I know your sins, I know your skin, I know your wings." |
submissions
| The Distillers – Drain the Blood Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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hey astrozombie-
i think the pearl reference isn't a positive one, about someone helping her out... it seems more like it's referring to someone who has betrayed her, like they shimmered like a pearl on the surface but in reality they were rotten all the way through.
Also, maybe she's talking about leeches? people who sucked her dry while pretending to be her friend? they tried to "drain the blood", but "the heart is wise" and can tell when the blood is being drained, meaning she caught on. |
submissions
| The Distillers – Die On A Rope Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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dying on a rope seems to suggest being lynched more than a self-inflicted suicide... and the scarlett letter is also something brandished publicly in judgment of some wrong-doing- possibly adultery, like amydillo suggested. maybe she's referring to how so many people turned against her and called her a bitch for leaving Tim? maybe the 3rd and 4th line are about why she felt she had to leave him, how she felt trapped in the relationship? |
submissions
| The Distillers – Coral Fang Lyrics
| 21 years ago
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I've always taken this song to be about heroin addiction...
the fang being the needle, sinking in to skin, making you ill, making you well (as in "getting well" after sicking out). I suppose it might be coral because in Australia they get pink rocks instead of black tar.
"Making your eyes white" makes sense because your pupils become pinholes when it hits and you feel like you're closer to god, so maybe that's the "him". And ESPECIALLY the part about "disease is cheap, scars are polished clean", obviously you can catch shit from dirty points, and scars would be trackmarks, that eventually fade. How dope "fills the years with reprise, disgust, disguise", and how it "takes at will", draining away your soul and leaving you a shell of a person basically. That's really what I get from this song. I love this song too. |
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