| Talking Heads – New Feeling Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| agree with "guarded" | |
| Okkervil River – Calling and Not Calling My Ex Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| everything in this song is in the last two lines. it is about saying goodbye to someone or something you desperately don't want to lose--but it's already gone. The only way to move on is to let go--and despite how clearly the singer knows that, the shape of the song suggests otherwise--why write/sing this song if you could really accept it? | |
| Sleater-Kinney – Light-Rail Coyote Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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this is the single closest SK song to an autobiography, or at least the biography of a fictionalized version of two people a lot like the band members. they are in a city (portland) just about to leave home as adults--borrowing parents' car, wanting to be seen, but in fact "green as this blade of grass"--no idea of the true nature of the adult world. They take jobs (work all day/play all night) -- the first thrill of being on your own, & the adult city world seems mysterious and fascinating, "bookstores and punk rock clubs," etc. coyote refers to the real story, which is def. an inspiration for the song, but also ties into Coyote trickster myths esp. of northwestern Indian tribes. the coyote leads you on a journey but its nature is ambiguous--and in this song they discover the ambivalence of adulthood, "where the poor and the hipsters" (both dressed in cheap clothes, but only one because they need to)--"the grid that divides us all." this song is all about crossing--& in the title the moving vehicle that is tehcnologically modern (the light rail) is attached to something that crosses over from the natural and/or mythical world (coyote). by the end it is the darkness of the city, what they did not expect to discover, or maybe the actual nature of the mystery they were looking for in the first place, in fact is so challenging to the individual that they are on the "eve of suicide." it is only the friend--real or imagined ("if you want to be a friend of mine") who has to cross the tracks again. to be speculative, the tremendous chorus of "oh dirty river, come let me in," which even has melodic overtones of a spiritual (the line is about the same length as "old man river keeps on rolling" with caesura in the same place) suggests something like the ambivalence of life, being able to accept the bad (dirty) with the good (river), being able to pass from youth into adulthood. "wilderness" may be no less biographical, but this song seems really to capture something intensely personal for the band. |
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| The New Pornographers – My Rights Versus Yours Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| yes to comments by rkpetersen and DJ gif. as clever as the DRM "reading" is, and may even be a clever additional motif in the lyrics, if you have gone through a divorce, no matter what side you were on, you will know what this song is about. in fact, as much as i want to believe songwriters can inhabit the characters they make up, it is hard to believe someone could write this song without some first-hand experience. "my rights versus yours" when we started out as "volunteers"--i don't know if i've ever heard a song cut so clearly or so sympathetically to the heart of things. really--who is to blame in the divorce in this song--do we even have the vaguest idea? | |
| Van Morrison – Cleaning Windows Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| while i agree that a lot of the song is based in memories of working like the narrator, i think the key to this song are in the chorus and their being in the present tense: "what's my line/i'm happy cleaning windows" and "i'm a working man in my prime." to me this song is about what might have happened if he had never become "van morrison"--if he had remained somebody who cleaned windows, who "took his time," who "blew saxophone on the weekends." there are several lines suggesting caution, holding back--"curiosity killed the cat," "take my time." From this perspective the present-day van is more like the music the narrator listens to--in this way, the person who left home to follow their curiosity. At least, I think this accounts for the combination of happiness and wistfulness I hear in it. | |
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