| Rhett Miller – World Inside The World Lyrics | 19 years ago |
| This song was inspired by the Don Delillo novel Underworld ("I read it in Delillo like they'd written it to me") which is about the various underworlds that crosscut the 'mainstream' world ("There is a world inside the world that you see"), and how all these underworlds create the world we live in. I can see the connection to Sept. 11th ("If love is all around us, then how could this have found us?") but that also can be read as commentary on some of the characters in Underworld. This song is why I bought Underworld, and it took a while but I finally read it. It's a fantastic book. | |
| Neko Case – At Last Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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and if death should smell my breathing as it passes beneath my window let it lead me trembling, trembling I love those lines so much... God, she can sing. |
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| Neko Case – Thrice All American Lyrics | 19 years ago |
| Neko's love song to Tacoma, Washington. It makes me want to visit (though obviously not for the sights)! | |
| Neko Case – Furnace Room Lullaby Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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This song is about committing enormities. The first stanza is about twisting and breaking someone; perhaps she means emotionally, but it brings to mind a picture of someone burning the body of a murdered man - 'the coals went so wild as they swallowed the rest' (of his flesh?). She's twisting and breaking the man so that he can be eaten by the fire and she can be free from his 'throne on her chest', which makes me think she loved him at some point. But now he's destroyed. In the second stanza, she's realised what's she's done and can't handle it - 'wrapped in the depth of these deeds'. She's trapped in a hell symbolised in 'the basement' - a place which is dark, subterranean and spooky. The last line of this stanza is one of my all time faves by Neko "A demon holds my place on earth til I die", which I like to think references one of the lowest circles of Dante's Inferno, where Dante comes across a man he knows to be alive on earth. When he inquires how this is possible, the man tells of his hideous sin and informs Dante that some sins are so awful that once one committs them, one's soul goes immediately to hell and a demon inhabits the body on earth until the body dies. So whatever she has done, it is bad bad bad. The repeated "At night all I hear is your heart"s, I think of as another literary reference, this time to Poe's The Telltale Heart. She's killed him and detroyed the evidence, but the guilt is following her in the sound of his heart's beating. This is one damn fantastic song. I heard her sing it live, with a totally unaccompanied start, and it gave me such chills. |
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| Neko Case – Margaret vs. Pauline Lyrics | 19 years ago |
| In a radio interview with Neko, she said it was about how fate plays favourites - Margaret can't help but flounder, because Pauline is fated to be adored. Pauline sounds like a perfect princess, with a cool and collected heart and wavy cinnamon-coloured hair, while Margaret is oafish and clumsy - 'thrashing in a lake' and she lost three fingers at the cannery. And because it's fate, Margaret can never get ahead - she'll never be as clean as that cool side of satin Pauline. | |
| Neko Case – Pretty Girls Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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Gillianizmo, I've always thought the line was "Come chain yourself round my ankles", though I could be wrong, and so I pictured this as Neko's offer to let the 'pretty girl' attach herself to Neko and ride in her wake (figuratively, I pictured it as soaring freely over the land), seeing the world from Neko's perspective and thus freeing the girl from the hellish waiting room she's trapped in. I like your comments about guilt. Guilt is definitely a presence here, especially in the penultimate stanza with the 'and lovers who won't understand' - so Neko underscores her understanding of the girls and their feelings of guilt with the repeated "and I won't say that I told you so", because 'i told you so's are all about creating or encouraging guilt and shame. I never thought of the girls as dead, because this song is about overcoming the stigmas and restrictions people want to put on you, and it's hard to overcome this when you're gone. |
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| Neko Case – Guided By Wire Lyrics | 19 years ago |
| I love this song. It's Neko singing about how she's always been supported by the songs she hears on the radio, so she's never felt like no one understands what she's going through, because someone is "singing [her] life back to [her]." Also, she's said that she learned to sing by listening to and singing along with older artists, so her career as well as her life has been "guided by the voices [she's] deflected." | |
| Neko Case – Pretty Girls Lyrics | 19 years ago |
| I've often thought that this song is about girls who've "been bad", and are now pregnant and possible getting abortions - the "cold waiting room", the "flimsy blue gowns" (hospital gowns?) - and they are alone, "not a soul to take your hand in theirs". Neko, or the speaker (I conflate them), is exhorting them to not let others shame them with what happened. "They blame it on you, pretty girls" I take as people saying it's these girls' faults for getting knocked up, and so Neko's determination to defy those who judge is similar to her earlier song "Mood To Burn Bridges", which is a great f**k you to smalltown busybodies. | |
| Neko Case – Dirty Knife Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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In interviews, Neko says that this song is based on stories her grandmother told her about various family members that went crazy at the same time. When someone found them, they were far gone, hence "cascading letters pool on the stairs, the grass is high, the cats are wild" - they had let everything go, and they were burning their furniture for heat. I love the imagery of insanity as wolves that have to be kept at bay with nursery rhymes and ultimately destroy the man. She also said that she condensed it into a narrative about just one person so it would be easier to understand and work with. |
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