| Joanna Newsom – Have One On Me Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Hey this is really enlightening, I would just like to add something: perhaps, given the volatile nature of "lola's" speech throughout her words, she is refering to all the men in her life by using just one male character, perhaps louis. And so, she is expressing all the emotions she felt for many different men who marked her life, some who have helped her, others who have tossed her aside and even others that she herself helped, hurted and tossed aside. And these men characters are not only her lovers, but her father figures as well, her step-dad for instance. Perhaps at the end of her long life she confuses all of them in this druken stream of thought and they all fit into a commom male presence in her journey, and so the long road beggins and ends with him but she can never make amends, she spent her entire life emptying her bottle by offering herself to 'him' whithout fully understanding what was it that she was offering and to whom, or even why she did it. Did she want love? Was she trying endlessly to please her long gone 'dad'? Or even herself or her mother? - as she says in Ribbon bows 'my mother may be ashamed of me, with all my fineries (this is another thing I'd like to add, once you understand what's behind 'Have one on me', it addapts throughout the entire album, as if the narrator has embodied this character lola and all of her different sides, it's really interesting to try and find her in all the tracks, her constant struggle between parting and leaving others behind, a sense of longing and the need to go over the top with excess to make up for that. There must be a reason for this being the Title track as you said). And I don't think that her being Good or Dad is the point, she was neither, she was just hurricane lola, both brave and fragile, cruel and soft, traitor and betrayed, manipulating and being used. Also, I felt that we shouldn't be very caught up by the narrator's use of YOU and ME, because it seems to me that in some instances lola (or the other 'characters' throughout the album) can be addressing a lover as easily as she can be addressing herself (this felt very appropriate in 'Go Long' or even the use of italics in 'Have one on Me', which to me immideatly felt like all of a sudden all the different Lolas from different points in her life where all stepping in at this moment where she looks back and goes on this almost hallucinated trip). It does not necessarily make sense, the same way that it doesn't for her to mix her dads with her royal lovers but at the end of the day, lola was in fact a rather erratic person who lived on the edge all the time, without any kind of boundaries or attachments to society, or even reality, and if you add the excess and the alcohol factor (very obvious in this song) and the need to love and be loved back, it does make sense and it is beautifull. She never was and still does not know who they were, the same way she never trully got to understand who she was and what she was looking for in her wreckless search. I went to a Joanna Newsom show last week and almost cried during this song, I truly believe she is the best poet musician I ever encountered. Sorry if my english is bad at some points but I hope I added something interesting because I really enjoyed reading your analysis. |
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