| Clem Snide – Fill Me With Your Light Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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I think it's the dying experience, retold by relative at the bedside who is deeply connected to thoughts of a dying patient. Perhaps you've seen the various indignities inflicted upon the dying. They are prodded and poked with all manner of instruments (that may or may not fit) and if there's any mercy in this world, they are hooked to a palliative morphine drip. Bubbles in a transparent humidifier chamber go pop. The opiates and the electrolyte imbalances brought about by failing organs blur the lines between dreams, reality, and memories. The patient loses trust in his ability to read the situation. Breathing comes in starts and stops. At a certain point, it becomes clear to everyone in the room that the most reasonable course is to go quietly, lying down, full of the light that characterizes the different dark of the beyond, and let the energy of the soul be absorbed into the collective consciousness of the universe. The feedback of the guitar in the finale emulates a monitor of vital functions, segueing from beep-beep to flatline. It is finished. |
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| Fleet Foxes – White Winter Hymnal Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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I think the writer's statement about the song's "meaningless" nature is probably mostly correct, inasmuch as he was not consciously trying to be "deep" when he penned the lyrics. As a songwriter myself, I often believe that my best pieces kind of write themselves, emanating from the emotional part of the brain in words that go together well with both each other and the music, as opposed to those that arise from extensive working and reworking within the analytical parts of the brain. So now I'll tell you of what I feel when I hear this song, and I’ll analyse a bit as well. Hearing the song and then reading the lyrics here brings out different aspects to me. This is particularly true with the lines "to keep their little heads from fallin’ in the snow". When I read it, I see how it can pertain to the scarves, but when I hear it, it often evokes the narrator as an older brother whose job is to keep the younger kids from hurting themselves, thus he’s “the brother’s keeper” following Michael as he runs through the snow with his friends and siblings, all in their scarves and oversized winter coats. But he's still a distractible, error-prone kid himself, and "there you go" is a you-know-what-I’m-talking-about confession of both how things can happen in a blink of an eye, and the helplessness he sometimes feels when a bad thing happened because he had averted his attention. But there's no (or very little) blood when Michael falls; all (or most) of the red in the snow is from the brightly colored scarf that splays in various ways about the younger boy’ head. Sometimes when Michael would “face plant”, the scarf would wrap around his head, making it look like a big, red strawberry, which makes the older brother laugh as he stands Michael on his feet again. Sometimes I see the narrator as a younger boy following a pack of older kids, trying to catch up, and Michael is lagging even farther behind. The narrator turns, and for various reasons, Michael “chooses” just that moment to “fall”. Again, no tragedy, just kids doing what they do. Sometimes I think of the archangel Michael, and “you would fall” thus refers to a fallen angel, but more specifically in the sense that everyone, including the narrator, loves the angelic Michael, but the narrator is reminded of his brother’s humanity when he does something un-angelic. But I don’t think the writer was actively thinking about such an obtuse, convoluted connection when he wrote this song. Does it really have to be any deeper than a simple image that countless kids have experienced? I do believe the line is “all swallowed in their coats”, both because that’s what it sounds like in all three verses, and because it’s more powerful imagery than “swaddled”. With little kids, the winter clothes are disproportionately large, and they look like they were quite literally swallowed up to their faces by their coats. This is why I tend to see Michael and the rest of the pack as little kids and the narrator as older, consistent with the first interpretation I offered above. A swaddled kid would not be mobile. There’s also the bonus that “follow” and “swallow” are phonetically similar and go well in their respective places in adjacent lines. OK, that’s it. |
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