| Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Mermaids Lyrics | 1 year ago |
| Song is about Nick trying to hook up via online dating. He believes in mythological beasts of beauty and divine deliverance, despite all the fake accounts. He tries harder with various alertness courses, but it doesn't help. Some pretty mermaids "wave" at him with a profile-match, maybe even a first message, but disappear right after back in the murky waters of the dating pool. "There's plenty more in the sea", his mates might say, but Nick is stuck on land, roaming the coastline, catching only mere glimpses of their waves, and writing song lyrics. | |
| Radiohead – How to Disappear Completely Lyrics | 3 years ago |
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This song, together with "No Alarms and No Surprises", and to a different effect "Black Hole Sun", is what keeps me occasionally sane amidst this madness of life, if only for a moment. I'm so isolated in the crowded masses, the noise never ends (the ringing even in those precious few pauses), their looks stab with stinging judgement, the stink and filth that no one mentions (or perhaps they don't even notice). It's hyperconnected 24/7 relentless mustbehappy, "What is wrong with YOU?", their products don't bring me joy. A shame I'm not religious, else I'd have disappear to the monk's life in a heartbeat. |
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| Tool – Eulogy Lyrics | 5 years ago |
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This song is the frustration of mixed emotions surrounding a person's demise. On the one hand eulogies must hold to a rigid structure of social pleasantries, saying how much we miss him and speaking highly of his deeds. But what if the death was foolish, and his character was less that savoury? This song, to me, is the emotional incoherence of such a situation. I've long wondered if our actions through our lifetime would change if, not just loved ones and the honour-bound were invited to funerals, but if also our enemies, or even just ordinary coworkers, were allowed to speak their mind. Would we then treat others more sympathetically? Would we be more understanding in our actions? The subject of this eulogy sounds like a typical self-appointed hero. "Don't you step out of line", and "you said you would die for me" suggests a military duty, but the zealous (and dead) hero might've been civilian. He was, in any case, someone who fancied himself a leader, but who ended up just spruiking loudly his self-aggrandised opinion. Some 'ism he bought into. He didn't inspire others to action, as a true leader does, but was "Ranting and pointing his finger / At everything but his heart". In other words, he wasn't a hero, he was a pontificating zealot. Lay down the obligatory flowers, utter something about ashy dust, and good riddance. Now those you left behind can rest, in peace. |
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| Björk – Hyperballad Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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No one has yet commented on this great song? Maybe it's hard to find, because the third letter of her name shows up here as "ö" not as "ö". This initially seems like an up-beat song, but when we first hit the chorus it really looks like there's a darker meaning there. First, the destructive behaviour of throwing things off the cliff . "it's become a habit" - perhaps compulsive behaviour. But this could still just be seen as someone toying around. Then that chorus, "I go through all this" - this has a distinct connotation of having to endure a burden, to have to do something perhaps unwillingly. "So I can feel happier" - there's the clincher. She's depressed, and throwing stuff off the cliff is a coping mechanism. Happy people don't seek out behaviour to "feel happier". Doing things "So I can feel happier" shows someone is dissatisfied, malcontent, sad, or even depressed. The second verse explains all this in more detail. "No-one is awake" - she does this so early, because she's ashamed of this behaviour, or for some reason doesn't want this other person to find out about her throwing-things-off-the-cliff habit "I'm back at my cliff" - MY cliff. She shows an affinity with this cliff-top. She likely considers the precipice as a place of reassurance. "Imagine what my body would sound like" - if there was any doubt about this song carrying a dark undertone, it should be dispelled with this line. She's imagining a suicide. She might not be seriously contemplating suicide, but she's at least imagining what it'd be like. So it sounds like a sensitive woman is isolated (I get the feeling of isolation here) on some mountaintop, living with her husband who is oblivious to her daily emotional suffering. A similar theme is explored in that US indie film in which she played. Or possibly an adolescent living on the mountaintop with her/his family, which then better explains the plural form "No-one is awake", and which really fits with the frustrations felt (see last sentence). The protagonist suffers emotionally, probably depression but finds some ounce of relief, and reclaims some sense of control, from sending random objects to their demise off the cliff-top and paying attention to, perhaps we could say meditating on, the details of how they're destroyed. To this she also imagines what her own destruction would be like - that ultimate control over one's own body, when one feels too helpless in the face of the external world's control. She needs this daily shock to her sensibilities - an in-sensu threat to her wellbeing - to make her feel appreciative of the security found in her isolated abode, with her oblivious and perhaps boring and unloved company there. |
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| Amanda Palmer – Astronaut: A Short History of Nearly Nothing Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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My interpretation of this is, at the literal level, it's about the difficulty of being the loved one of a celebrity whose first love is his pursuit of greatness, which of course inevitably comes at the expense of the human relationships around him. More symbolically it is about the stab at one's self-worth to know that the person you're quite deeply in love with considers you only a secondary feature of his(/her) life. The opening lines are about the astronaut being able to summarise his love for the author (his wife, let's say) with a photo of her used as a bookmark. Being represented like this makes her feel like his feelings toward are trivial, that she's easily dispensable, replaceable. The song repeats themes of the author diminishing in worth against the illustrious career lead by the astronaut. Lines of depleting self-esteem, and we are lead to believe their relationship is the cause of it, are peppered throughout. I'm not sure what to make of the last verse. But it sounds beautiful whatever it is. Amanda explains the background and some details of this song on her blog, but this song reverberated with me so much (and still does) that I thought I'd offer my thoughts anyway. I guess I'm the astronaut, yet why do I feel as vulnerable as his wife? |
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| The Dresden Dolls – Gravity Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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This song got stuck in my head a few days ago, and it's been on extremely high-rotation on my mp3 player since. Luv it! I'd sort-of agree with those who say it's somewhat about control, but that it comes with a few layers of other themes loaded on top. For me it sounds like the central theme is societal pressures - buy that house, marry that man, get this done by yesterday for the boss. She relates these pressures to an inviolable and fundamental force in nature. The "Now, Necks are cracking sideways..." section is a more visceral abstraction of being pulled this way then that by various people in her life giving her words of advice on what she "should" be doing. This disjointedness is represented in the (non-lyrical) music of this section, also. It leads into "Shoot me from my good/bad side", which is a more specific stressor of entertainers (such as The Dresden Dolls) to always look good in the public eye, only to have their image later ruined by random paparazzi shots of them at their worst. (Though, I like to think Amanda is above such vanity). "Some of us are getting mighty lucky" - some people profiteer from these pressures - e.g. bosses placing high demands, or marketers feeding us a sense of duty to buy their products. She tries to break out of this mindless loop of mediocrity, or in Amanda's case perhaps it is an attempt to break away from shamefully exploitative recording-label offers that might box her in - "You think I can't fly well you just watch me". To be honest, not sure where the officer comes into all this. Perhaps through all this pressure she exploded, and is trying to justify the reason - this inexorable, gravity-like force - for her recent stress-driven, violent crime. Perhaps? On a side-note, I thought "Honest to God, officer, it's awful." sounds a lot like "Honest to God, officer, it's all fall." as in, it's all always an uphill struggle! She probably intentionally (clever girl, that Amanda Palmer) did that. |
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