| Robyn Hitchcock – No, I Don't Remember Guildford Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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I don't completely know what the song is about, and I don't remember the Storefront Hitchcock intro. But, I always assumed this song was sung from the perspective of somebody who has just died. "Did something happen? The sky just blackened." Narrator is stunned to find he can no longer remember his life, after a recent event where the sky blackened. "Now there's a butterfly on my face" Butterfly is a symbol of death. Also, butterflies are matured maggots. Also, just having any kind of insect on your face suggests death. "And I'm a number on a drawer" Bodies in a morgue are stored in numbered drawers. "Hang up your net, child..." Admittedly, this is pretty ambiguous in the context of my interpretation. Perhaps the narrator is speaking to his surviving children. The "net" may refer to a butterfly net. "No, I don't remember falling..." Narrator describes his own death, in fairly literal terms. |
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| Gerry Rafferty – Right Down The Line Lyrics | 14 years ago |
| I've always loved this song, but I'm a bigger music nerd than my wife. However, the comments of the women on this board have inspired me to record a cover version as a gift to her. I hope she likes it as much as these commenters would. :) | |
| Gerry Rafferty – Mattie's Rag Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Shocked that there are no comments. An absolutely gorgeous song, presumably about being the father of a young girl. The vocal harmonies on the line "You make me see the light" send chills up my spine, given the lyrical context. I don't know the personal circumstances, but when I hear songs like this, I think about how that child can always come back to it, even decades after the parent is gone, and experience deep parental love. What a wonderful gift for a parent to give a child. |
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| Cake – Federal Funding Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Nothing about these lyrics are specific to the bank bailout. It could refer to any of the wasteful federally-funded programs that have been ongoing for decades. The cause of the waste is not "the banking system," but the propensity of the federal gov't to waste money generally. |
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| They Might Be Giants – The Lady and the Tiger Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I submitted the lyrics just to comment on this. First of all, the hook in this song is awesome--classic TMBG--and shows that they can still bring the special sauce even after all these years. Kudos, Johns & co. This is another brilliant Linnell lyric that explores the perspective of a person or thing that is normally only considered an object (e.g. "Birdhouse in Your Soul" written from the perspective of a nightlight). "The Lady, or the Tiger?" (see below for link) is a Victorian-era short story that contains then-established themes of Orientalism, as well as then-emerging interest in psychology. As such, the story is something of a "bridge" between two eras, as its setting is firmly Victorian in sensibility, while the thought experiment that it posed was a literary innovation, and foreshadowed the scientific rationalism that would characterize the post-Victorian world. The author of the short story presents a complex thought experiment by placing a character in a harsh dilemma--he must open one of two doors, behind one is a beautiful woman for him to marry, and behind the other a hungry tiger. The character must choose blindly, knowing that the wrong choice will result in a gruesome death. (Actually, the scenario in the story is more complex than that--again, see link below.) Cf. "Birdhouse," Linnell has inverted conventional perspective, and written a dialogue between the lady and the tiger as they wait for one of the doors to open. In my interpretation, their dialogue concerns their being stuck behind these doors eternally, since they are essentially props in a mental experiment that will never be resolved. (The short story ends the moment before a door is opened.) There are also shades of Schroedinger's cat--living beings trapped inside an eternal limbo created by an intellectual construct. Re: laser beams: Linnell often includes whimsically anachronistic or otherwise out-of-place elements in his songs, which often seem to be done for humor as much as anything. My initial weak interpretation is that the lady's "laser beams" are such an element, although I concede they may be substantively symbolic. One of the reasons I was motivated to post these lyrics (my first) was that I was very interested in hearing further deconstruction, as I suspect there are additional layers of meaning to this great song. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady,_or_the_Tiger%3F |
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