| Iron & Wine – Sodom, South Georgia Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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i read what others have wrote about the "white tongues" line being a metaphor for something... when someone dies, people like to say things like "if your dad were here, he'd tell you that you should stay busy." when people told the narrator what his father would say, he imagined how his dead father would say "god is good" with his white tongue hanging out of his mouth. to me, that phrase was a visualization on how he thought it was ironic for people to try and speak for someone when they're dead. he thought that people say ridiculous, shallow things about death and they don't understand the gravity of it unless they've lost someone. |
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| Iron & Wine – Sodom, South Georgia Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| hey i agree. i like your interpretation. | |
| Iron & Wine – Sodom, South Georgia Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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i think the way i interpreted the song is pretty similar to what a lot of people have said. the first few lines "Papa died smiling/Wide as the ring of a bell/Gone all star white/Small as a wish in a well" made me think papa had a quiet death and the narrator was struck with how frail life is. "And Sodom, South Georgia/Woke like a tree full of bees/Buried in Christmas/Bows and a blanket of weeds" here i thought the narrator referred to the town as Sodom because he felt resentful that when his father died time stopped for him, but the town and the world around him kept moving on, getting ready for all the superficialities of Christmas. i thought the lines "All dead white boys say, "God is good" referred to how people always try to speak for the dead and say that God is good. maybe people were trying to comfort him saying that his father is in a better place and to trust god, but the narrator felt like those were empty words that didn't have much meaning to him in the midst of his loss. the line "White tongues hang out, "God is good" seems especially sarcastic and pained, like he's saying "here they are dead, and they're saying god is good?" i thought he felt like people in the town made no effort to empathize with what he was going through, and it was ironic to him how their spiritual statements about the dead were very contradictory to his view of life at that moment as fleeting and frail. i thought he made reference to his daughter because he was remarking on how strange it is that people can die and disappear in an instant, and then others are born. and i thought he wrote about sodom again because he felt like during all these trials sodom just kept on doing its thing, blissful and completely uncaring of all the people that have died and the people who have experienced great loss. this song took on a completely different meaning for me after i lost a family member, but i never heard it as being a positive spiritual song. it seemed like the narrator was very questioning and was a bit resentful of other people's flippant remarks about death. that was my take on it |
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