| Warren Zevon – Wild Age Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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This isn't even CLOSE to a great Zevon song - for a song about wildness, it's pretty tame and chill, and not particularly interesting. But the long fadeout always makes me smile. Listen to Warren singing over the nice-but-kinda-bland harmonies - his voice just keeps getting crazier and crazier, until he's screaming in a way that must've hurt him the next morning. It's so out of place with the rest of the song, but so very "Zevonian" - love that. (I miss Warren.) |
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| The Mountain Goats – Psalms 40:2 Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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This song's pretty amazing - I love how the instrumental tension just keeps getting ratcheted up tighter and tighter throughout the whole thing, until everything just explodes at the end, the way I've always wanted a Mountain Goats song to explode. I think the whole point of the song is that when God raises you from the Pit & sets you high, it's not to give you a cushy job and a nice house - it's because He's got Plans for you, and some of those Plans might make the Pit look pretty nice by comparison. |
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| The Magnetic Fields – Time Enough For Rocking When We're Old Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| My favorite thing about this song (and there's LOTS of things I love about this song) is that on day three of a really bad cold, I can sing along with it and hit all the low notes. That makes it almost worth being sick. | |
| The Magnetic Fields – I'd Go Anywhere with Hugh Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| "What a sad gavotte," I think. - a French folk dance that can be done by more than two people. (Stephin Merritt will go anywhere in the world for the right rhyme...) | |
| The Magnetic Fields – I Don't Like Your Tone Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Small corrections: "You hiss that this is bliss, NOT LUST" - for the rhyme with "just"; "When near MY EAR, how clear you make..." This is, as far as I'm concerned, the most efficient job of rhyming that anybody has ever done while still making a song that makes sense and has a point. It's awe-inspiring. |
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| The Cowboy Junkies – 200 More Miles Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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I think there are some misheard lines here (either on my part or on the transcriber's). Her voice is such a (beautiful) whisper on this tune, and there's such resonance in the room, that you really have to strain to hear the details. "...Montgomery a recent *blur*" "... 200 more miles of rain asphalt and *lights*" "I'm travelling paths travelled hard before..." "...My life *wasted* on this road" "...my dreams \ *Scattered* dead and cold" "But *ahead* there is a light..." |
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| The Mountain Goats – Jenny Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| One thing I especially love about this song (beyond that "one thing in the galaxy..." line that still gives me shivers) is the double "pirate" references - it directly quotes the childlike adventure fantasy of the Disney song, but alludes to the darker escapist fantasy of "Pirate Jenny" from "The Threepenny Opera" - that's quite a mashup. | |
| The Mountain Goats – Color in Your Cheeks Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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First comment got it right, I think - it's about friendship, and openness, and welcoming the tired, hungry and poor, because there's always room for more. I'd add "Come on in, we haven't slept for weeks" to the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, just to let the new arrivals know what they're in for... |
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| The Mountain Goats – Dinu Lipatti's Bones Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Of the many things I love about this song, I love the way it ends. It's almost a fadeout, but it doesn't just dissolve - it gets quieter, and calmer, and it just ends in a whisper. These are two people in pain, clinging to each other desperately because there's nothing else to cling to. They're the kids from "This Year," a matched pair of high-maintenance machines, always inches away from breaking down. The hushed falsetto, the muted tones of the guitar and bass and piano, and - especially - the tenderness of the ending sound like a lullaby to me - like Darnielle is carefully and gently tucking the song into a soft bed and whispering to it that everything will be OK, even though it probably won't. It's an amazing moment. |
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| Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – Killers Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Just now, the title "vs. Children" makes sense to me. Kids don't have an easy time of it on this album - three orphans or soon-to-be orphans ("Northfield MN", "Man-o-War", "White Jetta"), two abortions ("Harsh the Herald Angels Sing", "Natural Light"), and this one, which is probably the bleakest. The Bowie reference in the final line is the funniest very sad thing (or the saddest very funny thing) ever. |
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| Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – Natural Light Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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For about the first twenty times I heard this song, I heard the line as "What if we'd had *A* kid?" It was just idle speculation - just a way of noting how long it had been since the two broke up, sigh, time passes, love fades, etc. - it fit what I thought was the mood of the song. But the instant I heard it accurately, as "THE kid," that mood shifted completely. Suddenly the kid's not an abstract whim, he's the focal point of everything (in spite of not existing...) He's the reason for "the fight" - he's the life they didn't have together. I can't shake the feeling that the singer and "Joy" are the couple from "Killers," even though I don't want them to be, because I want those guys to have made it through together. (Similarly, I don't want the dead bank robbers in "Northfield MN" to be the future selves of the "Optimist vs. Silent Alarm" couple, but they might be.) |
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| The Mountain Goats – Pink and Blue Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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OKC bombing interpretations feel a little forced to me, but there IS something very dark at the core of this song. "cardboard produce box for a cradle" - mashed bananas in a coffee cup for an infant - "what will I do with you?" It all points to something awful, but it's conveyed sideways, in a lullaby. I think the singer's wife - the baby's mother - died giving birth. The "nice new clothes" were probably a parting gift from the hospital, but the free formula samples didn't last very long, and he can't afford even basic baby furniture, and he doesn't know a damned thing about how to take care of a baby, and he's out of his mind with grief and sleep-deprivation - but also with love, for this tiny life that he's suddenly responsible for. Darnielle is really good at this - hiding an enormous emotional payload in words and sounds that seem so simple - and I think this is one of his best. |
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