| My Brightest Diamond – Dragonfly Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Boulez is a 20th C french composer. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=pierre+boulez after a bit more googling i found this excerpt from an interview by The Indie Handbook: TIH: How would you say your classical training has influenced your songwriting? SW: Honestly, the singing, I don’t think about it at all. But at the beginning of the writing process for Shark’s Teeth, I was listening to a lot of Boulez and so I was trying to write songs, more so trying not to be prescriptive of the songs, not dictating the form of the songs. Allowing the harmony to take it to a different place, or not having repeated choruses or kind of trying to find different ways of setting the text, so in a certain way the texts was more important, the texts and the harmonies were the priorities. You can see that with songs like “Goodbye Forever” or “If I Were Queen”. so that may be part of the answer. but also i notice that there's a joke in the pronunciation: so far as i remember, Boulez does actually pronounce his name with a Z as in Zebra. one would might expect a silent Z as in Chez Moi. So when i this verse, i expect 'Boulez' to rhyme with 'Way' (like 'Chez') form the previous line; which it does not... :-) |
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| Feist – Intuition Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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a beautiful song, about the struggle between two opposing world views: the logical against the intuitive. i'm also interested in how these word views correspond with the ways in which the two hemispheres of our brain see things - the left being rational and logical, the right being non-verbal and intuitive. a simplification, for sure, but worth reading up on. Or just feeling :-) But a little background from wikipedia: Intuition is the apparent ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason... Intuition provides us with beliefs that we cannot necessarily justify... The "right brain" is popularly associated with intuitive processes... anyway :-) after a descriptive first verse to set the scene, and a line that i'll come to later; Piecemeal could break your home in half she understands the problem with trying to live your life in a 'rational way', in logical 'steps' - a piecemeal approach - rather than sensing and experiencing the bigger picture in a more intuitive way. ('in half' here could also allude to these two opposing sides of the brain/worldviews) A love is not complete With only heat i imagine the word 'but' before this line. her left brain is trying to be objective about what she needs (more than sexual heat), whist ignoring what her intuition is really telling her. which is beautifully redressed in the next verse... And in came a heatwave A merciful save You choose, you chose Poetry over prose just listen to the way she sings this - all the heat, passion, and intuition is wrapped up in these few lines. this is where it's at - more heated and more musical, improvised (unplanned - intuitive), passionate... ;-) I think the word 'save' refers to being saved from the cold rationality of logic; instead, nourished by the warmth of intuition, manifested as a HEATWAVE of passion. Poetry over prose again symbolises left/right world views for me - poetry corresponding with metaphor and the intuitive right-brain, prose referring more to the linear 'language' of the left-brain. A map is more unreal than where you've been Or how you feel this line sums up by reminding us to trust our feelings over any map or conceptualisation of life. all of which leads me to the question of this 'boy'. in one sense the boy doesn't really figure - the song is really about intuition, and he is just a character in that story. But in another sense, it's all about him, it's all about the passion, as that would have been the motivation for the ideas in the song. this music wouldn't have existed without that passionate love. So it's NOT about a boy... but it actually is :-) Such is the dichotomy that feist so skilfully illustrates for us :-) one line i'm still not sure about: A destination known Only by the one Whose fate is overgrown is this the boy? if so, is she in awe of his intuitive abilities? but why overgrown? is she the one, or could the one be her view of god/the universe/fate? it could also be any of us, as listeners. There is no one meaning to any song, and this song is certainly deep enough to support many levels of understanding - i've enjoyed sharing mine with you :-) |
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