| The Avett Brothers – I and Love and You Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Poshboy almost has it, but I see a couple very important different ways to interpret the lyrics. I relate very much to this song, given a recent breakup with (who i thought was) the love of my life. When I met her I was struck by how brilliant, beautiful, and talented she was... but as we aged through our relationship and I grew to love her and her to love me, it became increasingly obvious that something was off..I knew when we met that she was recovering from a 3 year relationship (her first attempt at love) that ended abruptly when her boyfriend left her. It took me months to open her up--a process that owes itself entirely to my patience, energy, and belief in the woman she could be--but when I finally did, I realized that she was determined to maintain the distance that guaranteed her own emotional safety. Despite my best efforts to assure her that our relationship didnt have to end like her past--that WE controlled our own fate!--she eventually broke up with me because she just couldnt bring herself to let her guard down and believe in me the way she had romantically been swept away when she was young and naive and first attempting this thing we call love. What she didnt realize was that she was doing to me exactly what had happened to her. She had been broken by her first experience with love, and continues to allow that negative experience to disrupt any chance at a second attempt. And now, I look at myself and realize she, in turn, has left me broken. While Poshboy is very close, this is how I would interpret the song: First two stanzas, rightly interpreted, are about leaving his past behind and traveling to someplace new. He writes the notes to those who he feels would worry about his disappearance, but is too (ashamed, cowardly, or just plain broken?) to talk to them personally. "Brooklyn brooklyn take me in..." He's praying with all his might that the new city to which he travels will allow him to escape his past and rescue him from his current state of being. "When at first I learned to speak. I used all my words to fight. With him and her and you and me. Ah, but it's just a waste of time. Yeah it's such a waste of time." This is a nostalgic moment in which he ruefully remembers a time before his experience with love, back when he was young and carefree, living in absolutes and believing that life was about drawing the boundaries between human distinctions--perhaps a time when, like many of us, he believed humanity to be separate and immune to one anothers decisions and choices. But he recognizes that this line of thinking is a waste of time, and that something else is of much more importance and value to a fufilling life... "That woman she's got eyes that shine. Like a pair of stolen polished dimes. She asked to dance I said it's fine. I'll see you in the morning time." Music picks up, and the abrupt transition in subject tells you that THIS is what the song is all about. He's remembering the woman thats made him all that he is today. He remembers her as a elegant being with sparkling eyes, who one day in that all-to-distant past asked him to dance and from then on changed his life forever. He may at some moment even have had expected to see her in the morning like he used to, only now thats clearly not the truth... Brooklyn instead is here to comfort his woes... And FINALLY: this song's chorus speaks so eloquently the words that remain the refrain to my love life. No matter where I travel to escape my past, I'm left with the feeling of emptiness from the loss of perhaps the greatest woman I've ever known. The words "I love you" are now words that I find almost painful to be spoken. Im like her. Unwilling... or unable... to allow myself to open to another. "What you were then, I am today. Look at the things I do." |
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