| Joan Baez – Stones in the Road Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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The song seems to be about the way in which peoples' worldview narrows with time, due to immediate pressures, ambitions and the worries of day-to-day life. It is worth noting that when Baez was ten, she was living in Iraq, where she was shocked by the abject poverty of some of the people there. The song, however, seems to place the singer's childhood in the early sixties- the train draped in mourning is probably that of JFK, and the cities burning down could be a conflation of the race riots and social upheaval of that decade. But what of the stones? It seems they may be intended as signifying the change in time, and with it perhaps the attitude- in the early verses, the children scatter the stones, unconcerned about where they came from, more sending them on their way, whereas the last reference to the stones is concerned with the "mark from whence they came"- things closer and more immediate, and perhaps concerned for consequence. The song asks a rhetorical question in the last line- is it something childish, with unbecoming lack of concern for other, competing worry, to take such a wide worldview with ambitions of working for the "greater good", in perhaps nebulous terms? Surely not. |
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| Eva Cassidy – Fields Of Gold Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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The song, to me at least, seems to be a remembrance of a few moments in a relationship that defined it. The shifting perspective between the "voices" of the song and between times (the distant past, promises made in one moment in a field a long time ago) gives a sense of endurance of the feelings expressed in that moment, despite the absence of one of the lovers, perhaps due to death. The forgetting of the sun is a motif that I think shows the man (from whose point of view I think the third verse is sung) as not thinking about the essential impermanence of their relationship- the setting of the sun is a metaphor for ending, although in the last verse the metaphor is used in the alternate sense- the sun is of course still there, seemingly eternal, and its presence above the field perhaps triggering the memory. I interpret the song to be sung by an unwillingly absent lover, who, at the same time she (I think the song is from a female point of view) promises to stay, knows that one day she will have to leave- passage of time and the fact that only the happy memories invoked by that moment remain speak to me of a close relationship, most clearly expressed in that one moment in the field that was forced apart in the distant past, which the survivor has not forgotten. |
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