| The Wallflowers – Days of Wonder Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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Yes, it's a song about war, and, judging by the tone of the last verse, it's an anti-war song. What I don't quite understand is why Dylan couples a song about war with so much beautiful natural imagery. My best guess is that Dylan is trying to drawn our attention to the beauty that we miss while we're busy "killing time" and running "into oblivion's open jaws." |
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| Warren Zevon – Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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My opinion on this song is basically the same as Magpie's. In the final verse, Roland, like all good monsterous horror figures, becomes a symbol for something much larger (and scarier) than himself. He becomes an image of political violence and is connected to the IRA (Ireland), PLO (Palestine), etc. What Patty Hearst "bought," is, as magpie said, the belief that violence can be used to bring about social change. |
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| The Wallflowers – The Beautiful Side of Somewhere Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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I *think* this song is about death. More specifically, I think it's about the death of the song's "narrator" who was murdered (or died suddenyly anyhow) and is singing to the wife/lover/family he left behind. There are a few lines that seem to imply that the narrator is dead: "Trying to believe for you That the body didn't drop I am on a platform Covered with dust I pray they take the both of us" And "I'm lying in my Sunday best Assuming this was not a test" In this context, "The Beautiful Side of Somewhere" is the afterlife. And the first few lines are refering to the grief that the person being sung to will feel when they lean of the singer's death. Just my best guess. |
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| The Wallflowers – Back to California Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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I agree Stoolhardy. This one is pretty straightforward. Of course, Dylan uses religious references ("Straightis the gate..") to turn California into a sort of substitute for an Eden-esque paradise, which makes the song a bit more transcendent than it originally appears. (Some day I'm just going to count how many references there are to the Biblical Eden story in the Wallflowers' songs. There's a bunch of them.) |
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| The Wallflowers – 6th Avenue Heartache Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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I think the comments about city life and Jakob's father definately make sense. You do get an erie sense that the homeless guitar man could be a stand in for Bob in the song. Personally, my completely uneducated opinion has always been that this is an existential love song about how in a cruel, uncaring world, shared pain ("the same black line that was drawn on you / was drawn on me") can be the only form of communion that two people can truely share. Also, am I wrong to think that the use of "6th Avenue," often connected to shopping, and that "black line," often used as a financial term ("in the black"), in the song is a subtle condemnation of the capitalistic system that has caused the homeless man's problems? Perhaps I'm stretching that a bit much, but it makes some kind of sense. |
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| The Wallflowers – Sleepwalker Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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The Sam Cooke lines is a brilliant bit of referential lyricism. He's actually making three references to Cook in those two short lines. The first, to Cooke's song "Cupid," was already explained by DJacques. Dylan also plays on Cooke's famous song "Wonderful World (Don't Know Much)" in which Cooke sings, "I don't know much about history ... geography ... [etc.] but I know that I love you and I know that if you love me too, what a wonderful world it would be." Dylan's effectively reverses the meaning of this song, just as he reversed "Cupid," when he sings, "Sam Cooke didn't know what I know" (I.E., that love isn't the wonderful thing Cooke claimed it was). The final, more subtle reference is to Cooke's tragic death. Cooke was shot and killed in a seedy hotel under mysterious conditions. The woman who he slept with prior to his death claimed that he tried to rape or attack her and that he was shot in self-defence, but the common belief now is that he was seduced, robbed and murdered. Dylan is probably playing on Cooke's death ("Sam Cooke didn't know what I know") in the song to imply, basically, that love kills. The rest of the song is more mysterious to me. I'll have to give it a closer look and try to disect it. |
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