| The Decemberists – Shiny Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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My personal interpretation is somewhat (entirely, really) different than everyone else’s, apparently. The way I see it, the narrator is an army man, and is obviously romantically involved with one of the other men in his regiment. The song just doesn’t make any sense to me, otherwise. The two get up to something in a carnival/fairground, and the tawny gypsy girl sees them from where she is sleeping and alerts the authorities, who, naturally, come running and arrest the two (I suppose they’re in some place/time where their actions would illicit such a reaction). The other boy lied, and now our narrator is fulfilling the consequences; maybe he is in jail or somewhere similar, being punished, and thinking about how the fellow he loved (or at least trusted) betrayed him. Or perhaps the other boy lied and took it upon himself, and the narrator is remembering his eyes as shiny, or perhaps visiting him in his penitentiary or something [I am sure you all get the idea]. As well, it does not make sense that the narrator would switch subjects from his brother-at-arms to the gypsy girl halfway through the third verse. He begins the stanza by discussing the girl, but then doesn’t seem to mention her again. I find it funny that it never occurred to me that this could’ve been his relationship with the girl, or any girl in general. It just seems like such a strange way to go about phrasing it, if that is indeed the intention of the song. Maybe I’m just thinking about it too literally. Either way, it’s my point of view and I like it. Cheers! |
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| Franz Ferdinand – Well, That Was Easy Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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Well, my thinking's like this: The first bit, about how everything's easy/normal now, means he's somewhere highly regulated, (aka an asylum). He misses the craziness and interestingness of normal life in the real world. Then the bit about the Codeine is how he tried to numb himself with the Codeine (but since he's insane or whatever he just didn't know that the Codeine could kill him, and everyone took it to mean he tried to kill himself, so they shipped him off to the institute), and now he REALLY wants to kill himself because he's left home and is unhappy wherever he is. Next, it was so easy, because he didn't actually do anything. He just took some Codeine and then some people came to take him away. Simple. And now he misses home. Now the phonedial bit: he's in the asylum reminiscing about life back in the good old days at home, when he could just sit and creepily/obsessively watch his girlfriend or whoever perform minute little tasks such as the cleaning of the phonedial. The overplayed grotesqueness of the image is there to emphasize the overplayed grotesqueness of his thoughts/mind, thus the reasoning behind putting him in the institute. But you know, I'm not 100% on that. So believe whatever you want to. :) |
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