| Sleater-Kinney – The Ballad of a Ladyman Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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Corin Tucker said that the song is "almost making fun of how people see us, how people see what you're supposed to be when you're a woman in rock." The song was inspired when the band was invited to the Bowlie Weekender music festival in England in 1999. Tucker explained, "We were all staying in little chalets or whatever and we had our own cabin and we were cabin 216. Someone wrote this message to us that was like, 'Cabin 216 ladymen.' And we were like, 'What?' It was meant to be a funny thing, but in this other way, it was really this naming of us. It was a subtle way of saying, 'Oh, you're different because you're a woman band and because you're in some ways political.' It's still seen as threatening to people. It's not like we had this weekend where we just relaxed with everyone and just hung out." |
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| Le Loup – Outside of This Car, the End of the World! Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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from the liner notes: "i thought up this song when i was riding late at night through some old factory-town in Ohio. it was about 11:30, and the street was completely deserted. the streets were lit by these dull-orange streetlights, and the only buildings were abandoned storefronts and, inexplicably, these crumbling, concrete deals with rusted pipes sticking out every which way. it looked, needless to say, very apocalyptic to me. very alarming and beautiful." |
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| Le Loup – We Are Gods! We Are Wolves! Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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from the liner notes: "this summer, my girlfriend nannied for a family with a three-year-old boy. he loved this song; he called it the “silly song,” and he would request that it be played in the car, more than the sesame street CD he had. what a great kid! i didn’t tell him it’s about really destructive, old-world type gods, and the often dark nature of organized religion. it is a pretty damned silly song, though, i guess." |
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| Le Loup – Le Loup (Fear Not) Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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from the liner notes: "these lyrics make no sense, or very little sense. the grammar is very poor. and I’m okay with that. it was supposed to be more of a stream-of-consciousness thing- a series of vaguely menacing images, all associated with the night-time and forces of nature (generally the predatory types). i wanted it as sensory as possible – not necessarily linked to coherent thought – thus, the skittery half-sentences and wordless harmonies. i was hoping for it to represent, generally speaking, a wild crush of outside aggressors, and a vague sense of anxiety about the unknown. nevertheless, i think the end came out pretty triumphant, which was what i was hoping for." |
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| Why? – Sick 2 Think Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| he is taking his own picture in these places where he thinks he looks the best -- places that are generally thought of has being unflattering. | |
| First Aid Kit – When I Grow Up Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| yessssss | |
| Defiance, Ohio – The Reason Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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from the Defiance, Ohio website: "In the years that we’ve been a band, a lot of people have come to shows, put on shows, ate with us, helped us out, and become our friends! Some didn’t get the chance to make it the next time. This song is for the folks who made us lucky enough to be a part of their lives before they passed away." |
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| Defiance, Ohio – Dissimilarity Index Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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from the Defiance, Ohio website: "The dissimilarity index is a measure of how evenly distributed different groups of people are spread across different neighborhoods in a city. I wrote this song after moving to Chicago, a city that has a long history of racial and economic segregation where its easy for people and places to feel impossibly disconnected. This sociogeographic disconnection made me think about the separation of pieces of my life." |
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| Defiance, Ohio – The White Shore Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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from the Defiance, Ohio website: "I struggle to sort out how race impacts my life and mediates who I am and how I move through the world. In many ways, this confusion mirrors our culture’s crisis in learning a language and understanding of race that feels true to the complex, often conflicting experiences that so many people have. It seems easier to run from race because it defines us in such crude, stark terms: either white or of color, oppressor or oppressed. In this flight, I fear that, along the way, we lose a sense of who we are and the possibility for a future that is deep and rich." |
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| Defiance, Ohio – The Temperature is Dropping Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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from the Defiance, Ohio website: "Animals thant can hibernate can survive for several days or weeks, their body temperature lowering and metabolic rates slowing. Hibernation is similar to states of hypothermia which an be fatal. However, hypothermia is sometimes induced to increase the chances of survival during certain medical procedures. In a radio story about the Cambodian garment industry trying to maintain ethical and even progressive labor practices while competing with factories in places without such concerns, a Cambodian factory owner notes that an American worker, even without work, might survive for a few weeks or months, while a Cambodian worker, without wages, cannot survive for more than seven to ten days. There are so many ways of measuring the differenes in our abilities to survive. When the disparity is so apparent, how do we value the things in our lives that seem exciting, or moving, or tragic, when relatively, they can feel so petty?" |
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| Defiance, Ohio – This Year Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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from the Defiance, Ohio website: "This song is dedicated to the undeniable spirit of the kids in Iceland and also to Serene: thanks for the music that you make!”" |
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| Defiance, Ohio – This Feels Better Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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from the Defiance, Ohio website: "This song was written in five minutes in the back set of an overcrowded van somewhere on a national road in France. It was written after we were told by Skit Youth Army, who we played with in Lyon, that we needed to write more songs about skateboarding. There are the things that you do because you think they matter, the things that you do because you can’t help it, and the things that you do because they are all you can manage. Sometimes you get lucky enough to fell that there isn’t any difference." |
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| Defiance, Ohio – Sometimes Motion Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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from the Defiance, Ohio website: "This is the last song I ever wrote as a resident of Columbus, Ohio. I wish it could have been a more eloquent elegy for a town that, despite its faults, has proven to be such a large part of the person I’ve become. I also feel like I should be somehow penalized for writing a song about being on tour and that uses the phrase “on the road”, as I’m sure I’ve made fun of that phrase many times myself. I wrote these words after having a conversation with BZ where we both decided that we would rather be on tour than watch our friends flee the city or mope sadly alone in their houses. It was hard to accept that something like going on tour, which has always seemed pretty unnatural to me, was a bigger part of my life, or maybe just made more sense at the tume, than trying to struggle with my friends to be happy in Columbus, or the education that I had just finished, or the relationships that I was trying to figure out. So, this song, for me at least, isn’t really about being on tour, or traveling, in any more than a superficial sense. It’s about realizing that the life that you live is the one that you choose — that you can be happy with that life, or you can choose a different one, but you can’t do either of those things without first accepting what it is that your life has become." |
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| Defiance, Ohio – To Lanterns, Denver, and One Last Lament Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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from the Defiance, Ohio website: "This song is about friends going their seperate ways. It’s about missing the friends that I left behind in Columbus. Sometimes I have drifted away from people and now want nothing to do with them, but they still possess all the amazing traits that made me want to spend all the time I did with them. I want to remember this, and I want them to know this as we move on." |
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| Defiance, Ohio – Tanks! Tanks! Tanks! Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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from Defiance, Ohio website: "The U.S. spends over 300 billion dollars ($300,000,000,000.00) on it’s military. The Navy’s got 9 super carrier battle groups, stealth aircrafts, and all kinds of stupid toys that no-one else in the world has the money to have. It’s over the top, it’s stupid. what better way to find cheap labor to sew all the military’s apparel than locking people up for petty drug charges, giving them an orange jumpsuit, and have prisoners do your dirty work for you!" |
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| Defiance, Ohio – never forget, ever Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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from Defiance, Ohio website: "Despite the potency of our personal histories, I try to think that what matters, damn it, is what we’re doing now. And what we’re doing now is defined less by our identities and ideas and more by the reality of the actions in our lives. Still, I’d like to hope that all the conversations that we have and the proclaimations that we make at least give us something to hold ourselves to." |
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| Defiance, Ohio – Promises Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| "This is simply about being hard on yourself when you don’t live up to your own expectations. It’s hard to find a balance between holding yourself to ideals or goals and being flexible." -- Defiance, Ohio website | |
| Agent Ribbons – The Wolf Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| i think it's "little lamb" not "little M" | |
| Mountain Man – Dog Song Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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From the Mountain Man website: "Molly wrote the dog song while visiting her best friend Ally in New Orleans. She was feeling fairly lovesick and lost in tropical chaos. Ally’s living room floor was covered in potting soil, small seeds and larger green leaves (which could easily have been made into wings or a boat) and a guitar with only three top strings. With the help of the guitar, Molly’s questions came out to comfort her, to tell the fall’s unfamiliarly warm night air “I belong too”, making the Dog Song." |
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| Mountain Man – Animal Tracks Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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From the Mountain Man website: "Alex wrote Animal Tracks in her tiny, wonderfully bright room at Bennington College. Spring had finally arrived after months of cold and darkness. Fresh indoors from a twilight walk, she spent a lovely, solitary evening listening to the peepers near the pond, and to the wind rustling the dark night through the open window. And what popped out but Animal Tracks!" |
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| Mountain Man – Sewee Sewee Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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From the Mountain Man website: "Sewee Sewee happened to Alex in her sleep, at least some of it. She woke up in the middle of the night thinking she had written the perfect song, but all she could remember in the morning was, 'sewee sewee, we traveled far on this road we’re on.'" |
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| Mountain Man – Mouthwings Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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From the Mountain Man website: "Mouthwings is a song about creating for the love you will eventually receive, as opposed to loving the creation itself. It is also about being a mother, or what amelia thinks being a mother might feel like. Amelia wrote this song in her backyard one spring afternoon while the neighbors were yelling and the cat would not leave her alone." |
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| Mountain Man – Soft Skin Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Molly wrote this song and put this explanation on the official Mountain Man website: "Soft Skin is a series of questions following the first line of the song, 'I’ve got soft skin, are you gonna let me in?' It plays off the associations between women, their soft skin, and vulnerability, or openness within (sexual) relationships (Molly’s generalization). Soft Skin is meant to question the origins and entaglements of the desire for violence in sex (socialization?), as well as the blurry lines between love, lust and gender roles as played out through ‘intimacy’. Enjoy." |
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| Rasputina – Meant To Be Dutch Lyrics | 14 years ago |
| something about this song reminds me of their earlier song, "Endomorph." someone who is unhappy and self-deprecating and can't seem to feel honest. but other than that, i don't know... love this song, though. | |
| Rasputina – Snow-Hen of Austerlitz Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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From Rasputina's website: "Here we find the Feral Children: http://www.feralchildren.com And here is the original Snow-Hen: http://www.feralchildren.com/en/showchild.php?ch=jostedalsrypa I think I devoured that entire Feral Children website. Austerlitz is a town here in Columbia County. They say that it was named as Martin Van Buren's revenge on Waterloo, NY. Van Buren was a Napoleon fan." |
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| Rasputina – The 2 Miss Leavens Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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From Rasputina's website: "I've long-liked the painter Ammi Phillips. He was an itinerant portraitist or "limner". In the time before photography, painters traveled around looking for clients. A lot of their work was anonymous, not really thought of as art. I like the often-strange human proportions and stiffness in this work. They were craftsmen, not polished like European painters. Ammi Phillips worked a lot in Columbia County, NY (where I live and the locale that Sister Kinderhook is based on). I particularly liked his portrait of a young teen-aged girl, Harriet Leavens. Try as I might, I could not find any biographical information about her whatsoever. Memorial pictures are another anonymous art/craft form that I'm a fan of. These were women's work. Eunice Pinney is one of my favorites. In one of her mourning pictures, she prepared a memorial to herself when she was 43 years old, leaving space on the tombstone for her children to fill in her age and the year of death. In an unusual undedicated memorial picture, she left space on the tombstone for someone to write the name, age and year of death of the deceased person. It was a blank and a business plan – she was pre-making memorials to sell. You'll find a certain kind of verse on these memorial pictures. This is what Eunice wrote on the back of her own: 'For Oliver Hector Holcombe if he will get it framed: Dear children pray now and then cast A sorrowful thought upon me, You see where you'r coming at last. Prepare you for eternity. This piece is the product of one week. Finished by your disponding mother June 13- 1813 Who worships the great God; that instant joints The first in heav'n, and sets foot on hell. Faith builds a bridge from this world to the next, O'r death's dark gulf; and all its horror hides.'" |
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| Rasputina – Holocaust of Giants Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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From Rasputina's website: "Oh my Gosh, this idea is so fun. So, let's say that giants were a true ancient race, that they were mentioned in the Bible and their burial mounds are all over North America. Some giants' giant graveyards are as big as many football fields. Early Ohioan farmers were frequently finding big bones, but then came the big Smithsonian cover-up! According to my sources, it is quite a sinister institution: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/720497/posts I thought the story of the giant petrified woman in a waterfall and the multitude of footprints heading for water were quite poignant. I'm interested in the emotional life of fantastical characters –like, for example, how does a clone feel about being a clone? What I like about history is how people remain a lot the same – the same fears and hopes over centuries. I hereby include giants in that shared emotional history: http://s8int.com/phile/giants21.html Giants at war: http://www.stevequayle.com/Giants/N.Am/N.Am.War2.html " |
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| Rasputina – Sweet Sister Temperance Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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From Rasputina's website: "I've never been into poetry, even though song lyrics are a lot like it. I have thought it pretentious sounding, even though I have a ravenous love for words. But I started coming across biographical tidbits about Emily Dickinson – that she wore only white, that she never left the house. I read "My War are Laid Away in Books", by Alfred Habegger, and became obsessed. She is incredibly fascinating – such a strange character. I got so excited about how her poems related to her life. I am interested in artists who were not known or appreciated in their lifetime. J.S. Bach is another one. Now, I wonder why that should interest me so? On Easter Sunday, 1809, my paramour and I visited Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, Mass. It was a great field-trip. It was a thrill to see her own bedroom and the window where she lowered a basket of brownies to the children below! Her brother's house next door is also very interesting. It's quite decrepit and un-renovated, which is just how I like a house to be. Her letters are as good as her poems, maybe more so in my opinion. I took phrases from her letters and biography for this song. Of course, as always, I also wrote original lines and took applicable turns of phrase from my cut-n-paste computer notebook. This collage writing is my typical way of working. Hey, I've read that the Bible is a collage! Verse, not used: Clutching a vanilla-scented heliotrope, and a Lady's Slipper orchid, {flowers on Emily's casket} She whispered imploringly to me, {made up} "I could not make up my mind; do you think he ever did?" {from a letter by Emily}" |
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| Mountain Man – White Heron Lyrics | 14 years ago |
| i hear "some glasses, a gun, and a pen" ... makes sense to me, with the dead bird imagery. | |
| Glasser – Tremel Lyrics | 14 years ago |
| sounds like "caught in the rocks" ? | |
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