| Cage the Elephant – Halo Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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This song really spoke to me when I heard it the first time. To me it seems like it's about someone hopelessly in love with someone who likes the attention but doesn't want anything else. 'Tell me that you love me/ Hold me tight so we can always be friends'. This is the voice of the love interest. S/he wants to be adored without reciprocating the feeling. The descending 'aah' sound is the singers retrospective scream of disappointment and his internal letdown at the word 'friends'. The falsetto, 'I've said it before, and I'll say it again!' is clearly representative of the singers clouded judgement. The higher voice implies nievity. He is doing exactly what this horrible, selfish person wants. Again, this is followed by 'ahh', suggesting that the narrator is frustrated by his own naivety. The phrase, from the voice of the narrator's infatuation, 'Take me by the hand and/ Still remember all the good times we had' suggests that the person is trying to continue to lead the narrator on. S/he show that they have altered and become slightly more assertive by appearing to say 'I remember when you took my favourite knife and slipped it under my skin'. However it isn't clear if this is spoken aloud or not because the singer still reverts back to the same habit and repeats 'I've said it before and I'll say it again.' The 'favourite knife' is an ambiguous metaphor. (God maybe i'm getting too literary on this!) but it could be a phallic symbol representative of the narrator's sexuality. 'under the skin' is a phrase used to denote pain. Its almost as if the person being talked about is making the singer feel awkward or guilty because of their sexual desire. The simplest part to interpret is the bridge: 'Why does it take so long?/ Why does it feel so wrong?' The singer is trying to fall out of love with the person. They want to forget about them. This is followed by the chorus which is, for the most part, self explanatory. He/she has to stay away from him/her to stop themselves caving in to their old ways. 'I lost my halo' shows the narrator's loss of innocence, more specifically: their naivety. The moral is 'don't be led on by anyone.' Lastly the change in the chorus to 'All my life/ With a skeleton'. This is weird. Has the narrator been with this horrible person all their life? It doesn't seem to be a story of marriage. Everything else implies it's a story about young love/ loss of innocence. At first I put this down to a minor mistake. The skeleton seemed more relevant and it is easy to see that a skeleton is hollow, like this person the narrator was in love with. However, the phrase 'I had to let go,' put some doubt in my mind. Before, they had to 'lay low', the implication being almost as if they are hiding. But now they are letting go, as if they person was inevitably going to leave. Perhaps, the skeleton is a dead lover, friend or family member who the narrator was unable to forget about. I don't have any contextual knowledge of Cage the Elephant so I don't want to dive any deeper into that but hope this was interesting. Just my interpretation and I don't mind people disagreeing. |
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