Nigel Habercom
2
Points
2
Points
New York City born and raised. Worked as a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Bismarck, North Dakota for 35 years. Retired and married a Dutch woman and lived in the Netherlands 6 years. Now widowed and living in Florida.
| Elton John – Where to Now St. Peter? Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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My take is it is clearly about death - I think we all can agree on that. I feel the two verses are about two ways one may die - but the result is the same - we "are on the road to where all that was is gone" - the lyric acknowledges that your identity and memories are gone. The song offers no answer to what lies beyond but because of the lyric I quote, I feel that Bernie was trying to accept that it may be nothingness. The first death in my mind was drug related - at first a pleasurable experience and then it goes bad with paralysis and death. Song writers - like Steely Dan's Deludin in Gaslighting Abbie - like to make up new names for drugs, hence Blue Canoe. Remember the narrator in the song took it voluntarily - it wasn't forced on him like in an execution. The second death feels like the Civil War - which would be in keeping with the historical period expressed in many of the other songs on Tumbleweed Connection. Of course you must accept that foreign means the other side of the conflict ( I can see how it may be interpreted as a WW1 or WW2 death ). Final though I just love the use of the double meaning of the word report - the sound of a loud gun - and a summary of one's life. |
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| Steely Dan – Pretzel Logic Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| All cultural and historical events are of very short shelf life in the march of time. What seems so important to us at any moment loses much of it's immediatcy with time. Each era is lost to the next ones that follow. I find a similar idea in Steely Dan's "Caves of Altimira" ... although the loss of meaning in that song is lost over the period of the narrator's transition from a child to a man. | |
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