| Neil Diamond – Shilo Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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He was a lonely child who didn't have any friends, so he decided to find/invent a friend in his own mind to play with, and named him Shiloh. When he got older he fell in love with a "young girl with fire" who made him feel like he could fly, and she made him smile. After a while she decided that she had other plans, and had to go, saying that she knows that he'll understand. In his grief over his broken heart, he calls back his childhood imaginary friend "Shilo when I was young, I used to call your name, when no one else would come, Shilo you always came, come today." I think that this is a terribly sad song, because the child, later a man, never really saw reality. Instead of making friends, he made one up. The girl that he fell in love with bought into his imaginations and reinforced them. Then when "he had a dream that filled him with wonder", she abandoned him. Perhaps the dream was his first move into reality that he made after he felt secure in her love, or perhaps he was going deeper into his own mind's dreams, and the girl didn't want to go there with him. But her departure drove him back to his old invention - a friend who will always be there when he called. Shilo, or Shiloh, is in the Bible first at Genesis 49:10, as part of a series of prophecies that Jacob pronounced for each of his twelve sons. He said that his fourth son Judah will always have the scepter (a symbol of kingship) until Shiloh comes, to whom all people will be obedient. It turned out in history that most of the kings of Israel descended from Judah, and according to Matthew and Luke's gospel, so did Jesus, which is where the identification of Jesus with Shiloh came from. The name, meaning either "he whose it is" or "he who is to be sent (like a gift)" would be a fitting name for Neil Diamond's song character's steadfast friend. |
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