| Augie March – Heartbeat And Sails Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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I've listened to this song for 15 years but never tried to make sense of it, I'm trying today. After an hour I've got this far: "biting down on the great foam world" - he's talking about fish but also about himself processing the vastness of life and Earth, which one does when they look out to the horizon over the ocean. "I am senseless and drawn to the sun" - seeing the sun rise over the water on a pre-dawn fishing trip Also the song is called "Heartbeat and Sails", it's about emotion and... boats, fishing, I dunno. "... feel the subterranean movement a fraction and deep under ocean, the celibate rocks" He's talking about feeling a pull on the rod when the fish has a nibble Anyway I think he's catching fish and having thoughts about mortality when he gets one, "scoop my brains" is visceral imagery and is probably inspired by his gutting the fish once it's caught. He's relating his own life to that of the fish and thinking about his own mortality and "what is the looming thing" --- a sense of inevitable doom or whatever. I can't work out if he's talking about a literal "looming thing", like, did he almost die out on the rocks by a wave, or did he have a run-in with a shark? Or is it just figurative, I dunno. Perhaps his happiness, the thing that "makes him sing" is only something he can appreciate when he fully realizes his own vitality in the moment, his "Heartbeat" in the song, and in a context where he is thinking about death/mortality/his own small self in the expanse of the sea. I can't make much sense of the second half. He's gotten up from his bed where he's colourfully said that he had sex all night (beasts that we were in the night), but I can't decide if he's talking about love "tumescing"/growing within him or if he's literally talking about love "tumescing" into a baby - and then he's thinking about how love brings a baby into the world and then you have to "ambush" the baby with the knowledge that they're gonna die one day. It's unclear. Anyway I think there's a lot going on here, it's hard to decipher. |
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| Pixies – Greens And Blues Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| Probably has something to do with Byzantine history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots | |
| Augie March – One Crowded Hour Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| @[pods:459] September and June are nine months apart, so I wonder if that has meaning for this interpretation... | |
| Modest Mouse – Gravity Rides Everything Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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--- maybe it's not about pregnancy - maybe they had a fight about the girlfriend's weight; she thinks she's fat so "gravity rides everything" and he's trying to reassure her, "it isn't anything at all", "no-one really cared for it at all". "gotta see right now" refers to how when you're losing weight you'll check yourself on the scale every day, most people do it right when they get out of bed. Yeah this makes a lot more sense. He's saying he'll love her forever, until death, no matter what shape she's in. |
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| Modest Mouse – Gravity Rides Everything Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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The song is about makeup sex with a long-term partner and how awesome things feel when you're in bed, just before you get up; wishing that could last forever. "Early, early in the morning/It pulls all on down my sore feet/I want to go back to sleep" --- not wanting to get out of bed and "come back to earth" (hence: not wanting to feel the "gravity" in the song). Gravity has a double meaning in the song - gravity also means "seriousness" - the "gravity plan" is the serious shit that him and his long-term partner were fighting about, just before the makeup sex. When he says "what's the writing on your shelf" he's talking about her diary or something similar - somewhere she writes her thoughts / there is some tension in the relationship, they can't freely discuss. "on your shelf --- In the bathrooms and the bad motels" - wondering if the tension is to do with a pregnancy and he's talking about a pregnancy test kit, sitting on the shelf in the bathroom, and he sees it every morning when he gets up to take a piss. "As fruit drops, flesh it sags... everything will fall into place" - fruit dropping is talking about birth; flesh sagging is about age... and he's wondering if he's going to have a lasting relationship that will stand the test of time. I can't believe 110 comments and none of them are even remotely similar to this. |
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| Nada Surf – See These Bones Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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From website "Songfacts", "See These Bones" was inspired by a visit Nada Surf lead singer Matthew Caws made in the mid 2000s to the Crypt of the Capuchin Monks in Rome, who created a macabre but stirring environmental sculpture from the bones of their departed brethren. Caws said:, "It's a chilling place. Seeing all those old bones up close really drives home that this is it - and you better make the most of your life. Ultimately, it's uplifting. I left there in a bizarrely good mood." Here's a wikipedia article about this place: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Maria_della_Concezione_dei_Cappuccini There's a plaque in the chapel that contains lyrics from the song: A plaque in one of the chapels reads, in sixteen languages, "What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be." I still hold that this song is about gambling, but was probably inspired by the artists' visit to this place. |
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| Nada Surf – The Fox Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| I watched Quadrophenia the other day; in the end scene the main character throws his motorbike off Beachy Head which is a notorious suicide spot in Great Britain. Nada Surf have punk roots I'm sure they've seen the film. Either the song is about that, or about someone they know who may have committed or attempted suicide. | |
| Radiohead – Fitter Happier Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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We are trapped by the life we aspire to; the life we aspire to traps others. To be healthier, we have to cage pigs to produce our insulin; billions of chicken eggs to produce our vaccines. I think Thom Yorke is quite aware of this - it resonates when you hear him say "all the unborn chicken voices in my head" during Paranoid Android. As we get older we laugh at the naivete of youth and favour pragmatism, not idealism. We revile the desperation that comes with our failure to reach our previous ideals. We know we are failures - as we age, we idealize a "sensible" lifestyle and herald the "ability to laugh at weakness" - it's a shared joke among adults. We are all failures. We are so enervated by failure that we don't feel anymore. We just spout common-sense attitudes and lifestyle tips at each other in our old age. There is a deep dissatisfaction that nobody will talk about as we head into old age and death - like a cat, tied to a stick, that's driven into frozen winter shit. Dying cold and alone and trying not to think about it. |
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| Paul Dempsey – Ramona Was A Waitress Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I think conceptually this song is about robots and the future, the conversation with a robot in a bar or whatever Paul Dempsey himself said. That said, I think there is a more personal theme running through the song, certain lines make me think he's referring to the "feeling" of having a long distance relationship via webcam. 1. "There's a way you've always known her; Telephone between her cheek and her shoulder" -- using a phone to talk while you see each other on a webcam. 2. "Ramona was a waitress; All but made of information" -- you could interpret this a 2nd way, maybe he's saying the relationship was all in his head, the relationship was "all but made of information" because it only existed on the internet. 3. "...what if it's only worth; The bundle of nerves it's written on?" -- same thing, what if the relationship isn't really there when they meet in person? He's thinking about whether a relationship can exist "on the internet", outside of our bodies, then he's wondering "what if relationships are only really inside our heads"?. 4. "I don't need these arms anymore" -- might be a cheeky reference to how your arms aren't usually visible on a webcam, just your head and torso normally. Like, he's spent so long looking at his own head and torso on a screen that it starts to feel like an abstract picture and it doesn't really feel like him anymore, so he says "i don't need this skin and bone", you know, he's become disassociated from his own image. I think this is the emotional root of the song, the robots and stuff about the future and mortality were possibly added later to make the lyrics richer and the themes more complex; in my view it's a beautiful song about a fleeting long-distance relationship. |
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| Nada Surf – Pressure Free Lyrics | 14 years ago |
| I don't think Matthew Caws was ever married? His Wikipedia article sucks, doesn't say much about him. This song seems to be about him dealing with anxiety and modern life. | |
| Nada Surf – See These Bones Lyrics | 14 years ago |
| See my post below about how I think this song is about gambling. This is probably his memory of the moment where he decided to go to see his woman and tell her what he did. | |
| Vampire Weekend – Oxford Comma Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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The coal thing is probably a reference to John Negroponte's time in office as ambassador to iraq (somehow, don't know). Probably has nothing to do with North Korea like I mentioned earlier. This song makes me laugh now. I just read an interview where the interviewers asked Ezra Koenig (singer) about his love for Lil' Jon and he played along stating how awesome he thought Lil' Jon was. They asked him about this song and he said the song was about elitism, he's probably laughing his ass off about how nobody gets the meaning of this song but him. |
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| Vampire Weekend – Oxford Comma Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I'm finding out more about this guy John Negroponte. Not sure yet but I think that after he quit being director of national intelligence, he was the guy that came out and admitted that the US used waterboarding on guantanamo detainees? The connection with guantanamo and torture might explain the lines "all your diction dripping with disdain, through the pain, I always tell the truth' or 'first the window, then it's to the wall'. I don't know what the window or the wall "mean" yet. I'm sure I'm on the right track to some extent, maybe not wholly, but at least a bit. |
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| Vampire Weekend – Oxford Comma Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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This might be way off but I wonder if the line 'why would you lie about how much coal you have?' has something to do with North Korea, i read about how they dug a tunnel to South Korea then tried to cover it up when international investigators came upon it by painting some of the tunnel black and declaring that it was a coal mine. It was an obvious farce, you can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Tunnel_of_Aggression All the stuff in this song might be reference to international political events. I don't really know. In the last part of the song, "why would you tape my conversations, show your paintings at the United Nations", Lil' Jon might be John Negroponte. The painting might be the painting of Guernica (by Picasso) which was covered up controversially during a press conference involving John Negroponte at the UN. I don't know about Dharamsala but I know John Negroponte has gone there. Does this make any sense to anyone else? People have mentioned the Patriot Act earlier in this thread. John Negroponte was confirmed as "intelligence director" in 2005, a job created for him. 2005 is the same year the Patriot Act went through, right? I think so. Anyway, that made John Negroponte the guy responsible for the Patriot Act. When I started writing this comment I thought I was just clutching at straws, but I'm now convinced that this song is about John Negroponte. I feel like a detective. Has anybody else deduced this?? |
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| Nada Surf – See These Bones Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I think this song is literally about gambling and regret. 'From the sharks and the jets to the call in the morning' --> betting on a Sharks vs. Jets game, getting a call from the bookmaker in the morning to collect the debt. 'Life is just bets anyway' --> betting consumed his life. 'See these bones' --> The message of the song is to TAKE HEED of those that came before you and lost their lives, ruined them by gambling. 'The lights of the city are more or less blinking' --> Casino lights 'Try as they might, no-one's immune to misfiring and acting on the wrong clues' --> So many people think they can beat the house when gambling but they are wrong. 'Warm arms and cold faces' --> Struggling to decide whether to tell a loved one about the addiction or not. 'We take inventory' --> Working out how far behind (how much money is lost) 'We're digging, we're burying' --> Lying to himself about the situation he's in. |
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