| Elbow – Colour Fields Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I keep reading reviews that suggest this song is about advising the "local bombshell" to shake off the dust of her provincial town and go to the bright lights of the big city, but I don't think it's that, exactly - I think she's queer. The "fabled blisses" she's tabling are dreams of a love that she can't openly have in her closed-minded "dead town." That's why her father's blessing provides her with secret chainmail, that's why the dough boys (sounds like "dull boys" to me) are so confused by her. The "open mouths" could be about her beauty, but they could also be about the shock on people's faces when she comes out (or is outed.) He's looking forward to the day she can live somewhere more accepting, and her dream can become a reality. I sort of imagine him singing this to a teenage niece or something. |
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| Elbow – Neat Little Rows Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I think this song is about Guy Garvey making his peace with aspects of his upbringing. The repeated phrases in the first verse ("back in your box") and the second ("wind in your neck") are both colloquial expressions in Manchester and elsewhere that basically mean don't get above yourself, don't get ideas above your station. I guess his background was fairly working class, and in the UK at least there can be an inverted snobbery amongst the working classes where we tend to resent people who aim high, as if wanting to get out of poverty is the same thing as thinking you're better than everyone else, better than the family that raised you or your friends from school or whatever. I think that's what he's going on about here - maybe as a kid, saying he was going to be a big star with his music and getting told "wind in your neck, son." But then, when he did get all the success he was looking for ("found myself astride a tiger", "landed gentry ride on behind me") he realised it wasn't everything he thought it was going to be ("drown me now in down of eider", "now i found those sought out pages, can't read the text") and that he didn't fit in in that world as well as he thought he might, and realising folk at home had more wisdom than he credited them with at the time. So he says "don't point fingers" at the people in "the house where they grew you" (his family) - it's easy to blame your parents for things that have gone wrong in your own life, but as an adult you have to recognise that they loved you and were probably doing the best they could. Cobblestones and terraced houses (the "neat little rows" the song is named after) are symbolic of the Manchester streets where he grew up. (Ever seen the TV show Coronation Street? Like that.) So "lay my bones in cobblestones, lay my bones in neat little rows" - he's saying that Manchester was where he was born and Manchester (meaning not just the city, but his family there and everything about the place) will always be with him until he dies. It's like that Rupert Brooke poem about a soldier in the first world war saying "If I should die, think only this of me/ That there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England." No matter what happens to you, the place where you are from will always be a part of you, and I think that's the idea Guy's reconciling himself with in the song. |
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