| Bright Eyes – Classic Cars Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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'And I keep looking for that blindfold faith Lighting candles to a cynical saint who wants the last laugh at the fly trapped in the windowsill tape You can go right out of your mind trying to escape from the panicked paradox of day to day" NEVER ever have I read a more appropriate description of our struggle to keep believing in unconditional love, in spite of our bad experiences. Conor's metaphores take my breath away. |
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| Bright Eyes – Lime Tree Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| Has any of you ever done meditation? As the elementary intro of the album points out, this is a spiritual album, a spiritual journey. 'Observing the river' is a metaphor for meditation, and 'the ocean' is a well-known image for enlightenment. We are kept from enlightenment by our swirling thoughts, our daydreaming, our ego's and the tug of our serious problems, like that abortion. Our lives are dominated by craving and aversion, we are never satisfied. We want new friends, new music, and we want MORE. We long for the past and fear the future, while the present is slipping by unobserved. Meditation is about letting go of all that, about seeing the world as it IS, about silencing our obtrusive ego's, stopping our daydreaming, and staying in the PRESENT, the only place and time where we can find happiness. Oberst clearly has seen glimpses of that state, like fragments, feeling like something he's never touched. He knows it's there, and wants to find it again. But in order to be able to find it he must accept reality, everything in it, ripe ánd rotten, as reality always contains two sides. If he surrenders to that truth, only then he can step into the woods of the unknown and find liberation from suffering. Everyone who can consider this state as 'home' is very lucky, as he rightly points out. And we should turn to it NOW, as 'there will never be a time more opportune'. The song is about the difference between a life of suffering, as we all know it, and enlightenment, or at least the willingness to enter the path to enlightenment. I think the old lime tree refers to the Bodhi tree, under whose eaves Buddha found enlightenment. | |
| Bright Eyes – Cleanse Song Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| I think the song is about the Universe constantly revolving, changing, producing good times and bad times, and good times again. Empires rise and fall, and Oberst connects the fall of the Egyptian Empire with the fall of western society, symbolised in the destruction of the Twin Towers, the 'new pyramids'. He also connects his own cleansing process with the general need for cleansing our souls after the events of 9/11. Didn't we all feel contaminated on that day? Reincarnation is just another way of cleansing, we will get the chance to do things better next time around. The Universe is constantly (r)evolving, and so are we. It is an endless dance, everything is one, eternal and divine. Which doesn't mean we shouldn't do our best, it just means that things are never hopeless. | |
| Bright Eyes – Coat Check Dream Song Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| I think this song is about how terrorism and the ensueing paranoia put an end to individual freedom. The first verse shows the twisted and inflated mind of the terrorist. Fortunately many end up in The Hague's I.C.C., but nevertheless the sad outcome is war and loss of individual rights: 'Democracy's shackled hands'. Think of the loss of privacy through all those measures of control! 'A murderer still on the lam' refers imho to Bin Laden. And isn't the inside material of cars usually styrofoam? In that case the line could be referring to just another carbomb-driver on the interstate. The terrorist's acts have led to war, to 'cities encircled in iron', i.e. tanks and barbed wire, and all this while the world around us falls apart: war in the East, the melting of the ice in the North, the West gripped by fear and chaos (crashing cars), and continueing absence of rain in the South. Armageddon indeed! And the irony is that it's all done in the name of Freedom, but ultimately with the opposite and devastating results. | |
| Bright Eyes – No One Would Riot for Less Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| I think this is, just like most of the songs on the album, a spiritual song. Death can strike at any moment (the first part of the second line should imho be: in a breast between the markers, as Oberst is referring to breastcancer as one of death's disguises!), and we should not waste precious time but love each other NOW. We must wake up: 'Awake, baby, awake', and I think the blanket is a metaphore for meditation. We must go inward, stay true to our Self, and love each other. That is the only thing worthwhile. No one would riot for less! | |
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