| Plumb – Manic Lyrics | 19 years ago |
| I think she's singing about someone who cannot control their anger, and I feel it's due to alcoholism. She loves this person despite the abuse they levy on her, but I don't see any hope for change expressed in this song. It's worth noting that this song comes immediately before Cut and could be about a alcoholic (or other drug abusing) parent or partner. | |
| Plumb – Cut Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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This is a beautiful song, and I love the remixes as much as the one on the album. The song is about living through pain, like someone who cuts themselves to feel... but it could be figurative, representing any self-destructive behavior. Otherwise they feel numb, lifeless emotionally. Probably after something very traumatic like a bad childhood or lost love. She desperately wants someone else to understand, but they don't at first. At the end of the song the lyrics move to past tense... suggesting she does move on. This song really hit me when I first heard it. For me, my "cuts" are both past and present. These are old emotional wounds that won't heal and have deeply affected me but also new ones that I've (inadvertantly) inflicted trying to get over my past. I recently said to a friend "We only live once, but funny how we have to bleed to know we really lived." A Goo Goo Dolls line comes to mind "when everything feels like the movies you bleed just to know you're alive." |
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| Snow Patrol – Set the Fire to the Third Bar Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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When this song closes, I still sense a deep yearning so I don't believe that the two lovers are reunited. Everything makes sense as written until the second half. "After I have traveled so far" I agree that the lyrics are looking forward, the two lovers haven't been reunited yet. "We'd set the fire to the third bar" Is not a literal fire but is saying that nothing else would matter once they find each other. The search would be over. The fire as an image is important because the heat of a fire is in contrast to the cold he is enduring to reach his love. "We'd share each other like an island Until exhausted, close our eyelids And dreaming pick up from The last place we left off" This reinforces that nothing else in the world matters but reaching her and being with her. The island image is brilliant. Note that an island is another warm image. "Your soft skin is weeping A joy you can't keep it" This is where I'm lost... "skin is weeping" could mean sweating (which again suggests warmth) but I don't understand "a joy you can't keep it." I wonder if she's dead or otherwise gone to him forever and his journey to find her will never end. Either that, or even if they find one another they can't stay together and he will be forced to return home but I feel like it's the former. I watched a recording of a live performance of this and both Lightbody and Wainwright sing with such passion. Lightbody is shaking when he sings. So haunting and beautiful, tinged with desperation and yearning. * * * Not related to the meaning, but here is info from Snow Patrol's MySpace page: "Lightbody wrote the song towards the end of the album sessions and thought it would fit Wainwrights voice perfectly. By chance she was touring Ireland at the time. "Im not a great believer in fate." Says Lightbody. "But when someone called to say "Shes here, in this country and she wants to sing it, that was definitely "a moment." |
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