submissions

Neko Case – Fox Confessor Brings the Flood Lyrics	19 years ago
Hmm, reminds me of Japan. "Flooded fields"... those beautiful brilliant green flooded rice fields... and many of the little shrines you see are dedicated to a god of agriculture and wealth (damn, what was his name? I'm blanking out) whose messengers are fox-spirits. You can usually see foxes flanking the shrine, or a little fox figurine inside it.

submissions

Neko Case – Fox Confessor Brings the Flood Lyrics	19 years ago
Hmm, reminds me of Japan. "Flooded fields"... those beautiful brilliant green flooded rice fields... and many of the little shrines you see are dedicated to a god of agriculture and wealth (damn, what was his name? I'm blanking out) whose messengers are fox-spirits. You can usually see foxes flanking the shrine, or a little fox figurine inside it.

submissions

Bob Dylan – Shelter from the Storm Lyrics

20 years ago

I wonder how Bob Dylan feels about being "sheltered from the storm"... I once saw a diagram someone had come up with that showed the relationship between his personal and his artistic lives, suggesting that his songs were at his best when his personal life was at its worst. The storm she's offering to shelter him from is what inspires his most brilliant lyrics, even in this song. There's a line from "The Wedding Song", which appears to be an ode to the goodness and wonderfulness of his wife: "I'd sacrifice the world for you and watch my senses die." Maybe there are drawbacks to a place that is always safe and warm. I wonder if Bob Dylan is wondering if artists really do have to suffer to be good...

submissions

Tété – Le Meilleur Des Mondes Lyrics

20 years ago

Come one, someone with better French than I have has to comment on these songs and share their revelations with me! This is, by the way (I'm speaking to an empty room here, aren't I?) is about the only song where I pretty much understand all the lyrics. Pretty much. Lovely, poingnant song, and rather relevant lately, since the riots in France. I like Tété. I with my French was better... Aidez moi, s'il vous plait! Quelqu'un?

submissions

Līve – Overcome Lyrics

20 years ago

Jenna's information goes the longest way for me of explaining all the lyrics... I don't know that many Live songs, actually, but from what I've heard, there seems to be an almost ecstatic mystical streak to a lot of them. I think of stuff I read by Jellaludin Rumi and St. John of the Cross where the poet dissolves into God, which is a kind of death (holy drowning, maybe?). Lyrics like "the world is bleeding" and "women in the streets pulling out their hair" do evoke the tragedies of the world. It just doesn't make sense to me that, with "holy water" and "beautiful drowning", these are what he's overcome by in this song. Still, the emotional tone is somehow fitting for all sorts of situations, as many here have noted.

submissions

Iron & Wine – On Your Wings Lyrics	20 years ago
A good first song for an album that seems to have a lot to say about the briefness and sweetness and urgency of life. "God, give us love in the time that we have."

submissions

Iron & Wine – Cinder and Smoke Lyrics

20 years ago

Ah, lovely song! Just a few restrained and enigmatic images, and yet they somehow pack this huge emotional punch... I agree that loss and bitterness comes through very clearly, and strong and conflicting emotions: "You'll ask me to pray for rain, with ash in your mouth, you'll ask it to burn again". I can see why it could make you think of a toubled end of a relationship, but I don't know...the beginning of the second verse suggests to me someone desperately trying to offer relief or refuge to another. And think of the farmhouse, representative to me of something stable and unchanging. Home and family. But it's burning down, and the world of your childhood seems to be falling apart, with the dog dragging your mother's clothes through the mud, your mother drunk, your father pathetically trying to cling to something from another life. Notice that while this chaos is going on all around, the narrator's attention is all on the person whose life in undergoing this upheaval, he speaks directly and intimately to her, and each verse begins with "Give me your hand". For me, this isn't a relationship that's ending, but one that's just now taking off amid the wreckage of something that was once of central importance to this person's life. Maybe that's the contradiction in the last two lines: terrible loss, which somehow brings with it a kind of intoxicating freedom...

submissions

Iron & Wine – Cinder and Smoke Lyrics

20 years ago

Ah, lovely song! Just a few restrained and enigmatic images, and yet they somehow pack this huge emotional punch... I agree that loss and bitterness comes through very clearly, and strong and conflicting emotions: "You'll ask me to pray for rain, with ash in your mouth, you'll ask it to burn again". I can see why it could make you think of a toubled end of a relationship, but I don't know...the beginning of the second verse suggests to me someone desperately trying to offer relief or refuge to another. And think of the farmhouse, representative to me of something stable and unchanging. Home and family. But it's burning down, and the world of your childhood seems to be falling apart, with the dog dragging your mother's clothes through the mud, your mother drunk, your father pathetically trying to cling to something from another life. Notice that while this chaos is going on all around, the narrator's attention is all on the person whose life in undergoing this upheaval, he speaks directly and intimately to her, and each verse begins with "Give me your hand". For me, this isn't a relationship that's ending, but one that's just now taking off amid the wreckage of something that was once of central importance to this person's life. Maybe that's the contradiction in the last two lines: terrible loss, which somehow brings with it a kind of intoxicating freedom...

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