| Built to Spill – Virginia Reel Around the Fountain Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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This is one of my favorite Built to Spill songs and is also my very favorite Halo Benders song (I generally prefer BTS over the Halo Benders, but both creative collaborations offer us some very fine music. The song's title is intriguing. It's clearly a reference to the song by the Smiths "Reel Around the Fountain," a song that was in turn full of references to the play "A Taste of Honey" by Shelagh Delaney. The reference might have more to do with the inspiration some members of Built to Spill (at least Doug Martsch) took from the Smiths' guitarist Johnny Marr (who, by the way, likes Built to Spill). But it's also a reference to the Virginia Reel, a very old popular folk dance widely enjoyed in the mid-to-late 19th century. The lyrics (and the music) provide the listener a contrast between "reeling around the fountain" (being unstable, reacting emotionally, being ungrounded and unbalanced) and the "solid state" (being firm, unmoveable, fixed, stable, grounded, etc.). Yet, the aparant contrast is undermined by the questioning, "how can that be your solid state?" and the accusation that "you make it unreal". Clearly the "solid state" is not to be trusted or believed. The ambiguity and mystery of the one verse that departs from this theme adds to the song: "I still confide in you almost every day / Even though you're not around." This invites some mediation on how we can confide in someone, or what it means to confide in someone. Why do we confide? I understand that Built To Spill usually starts with their music and then the lyrics come afterward. As music is such and abstract and emotional form of expression, it makes sense that the lyrics are similarily impressionistic or abstract, evoking a mood or a state of mind. This (and many other Built To Spill songs) are like a Kandinsky or Van Gogh painting as compared to the more accessible and easily-understood explicit illustrations given to us by most popular music or ballads. |
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| Dirty Projectors – Useful Chamber Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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When a songwriter or lyricist picks words simply because they sound well together, one has to wonder if at some subconscious level the artist intuitively connects to some latent meaning in the words or sounds of the words. "Bitte" has been used in French, German, and old Norse. In German it's a polite word, a word of supplication. This song has a few lines of pleading: Call to me, soft and sweet / Cool the fire that burns in me /Catch me when I lose control. So there's that possible connection. In French "bitte" can also stand for a mooring post (probably this is what led to its use as a slang term for a penis). The image of a mooring post could connect with the idea expressed in the song that the the person wants and needs their love object rather than refuge from the storm. That is, one's love or the object of one's love serves instead of a mooring post. Orca is of course the name of the whale, but the sound "ork" or "orc" (as in orca, orcinus, orc-neas, orch) is associated with death, the underword, monsters from the underworld in various historic European languages, and was assigned to the whale because of the assocation between "orcus" and "killing" or "death." Killer whales can be vicious preditors of other sea mammals. At the archetype level the fusion of the opposites of love and death, or love and killing, is often made. One kills one's ego and replaces it with devotion to one's love object, or one participates in the cycle of aging and death to make room for new life in one's descendants. Doubt any of this was consciously in mind when bitte and orca were combined in this song, but knowing the historical roots and some deep meaning-structures of these words only adds to the beauty of the song for this listener. |
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