| Indigo Girls – Language Or the Kiss Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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This song is about a person choosing to follow her dream but giving up being with the person she loves (in this case, it's a musician choosing the life of music/touring/fame over her chance for love, but the song could be interpreted more generally about giving up love to follow a dream). The first verse describes the moment she made her decision: she was supposed to meet her love at a restaurant, but she stood outside and looked at the empty chair and chose not to go inside: "I choose most of your life goes on without me." she feels torn by this difficult decision and fears that she might "reap the praise of strangers and end up on [her] own." in other words, she will receive the glory of being a musician/singer, but what if she ends up alone in the end? "all I've sown was a song, maybe I was wrong." the tension between these two choices and whether she made the right decision is what drives the beauty and tender sadness of the lyrics. The second verse is about how she wishes for certainty in her life and wants to know how things will unfold, but that is the one thing she cannot have. This verse is also her memories of the person she left behind to follow her dream. She recalls being with the person and talking. She also recalls being alone and how she can figure things out better that way: "I used to lie like that alone out on the driveway. I was trying to read the greek upon the stars, the alphabet of feeling." she felt a calling in that moment to be a musician/songwriter and to follow her dream. This calling said, "if joy, then pain." she realizes it probably will not be possible to stay with her lover and have access to the reservoirs of feeling and language she has when she is alone. Years later, she feels the exact same calling: "the sound of the voice these years later is still the same." Fittingly, the final verse begins with "I am alone." she is alone in a hotel room. She is trying to write a song. She is "working through the grammar of her fears." writing songs is her "study." she writes songs best and has a bigger reservoir of feeling and language when she is alone. But this is what hurts the most: "mercy, what I won't give to have the things that mean the most not to mean the things I miss." she loves her former life and especially the love she left behind, but she realizes she can write about these things best from afar. Her choice remains the same after all these years: the language or the kiss. She chose the language, which symbolizes her role as a musician/songwriter and her ability to bring depth of emotion and clarity of thought and feeling to her fans and listeners. She left behind the kiss, which symbolizes what she could have had in a lover, intimacy and closeness with a partner but she would have had to give up the language. She remains torn about the decision, but she can never go back and she will always have to live with that decision. |
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