| Lynyrd Skynyrd – That Smell Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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Oh, and the "smell of death" he's describing is more of a metaphor than a real smell. It's the smell of desperation, of imminent disaster, a person coming unglued before your eyes and losing their control over their addictions. Johnny smelled that smell on both Gary and Allen; Gary managed to get clean and become the backbone that allowed the heart of the band to survive and reform. He's 63 and still kicking. Allen couldn't stop drinking, and died a paralyzed and stigmatized man at just 37. I guess you never can tell. |
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| Lynyrd Skynyrd – That Smell Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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Ronnie van Zandt was absolutely the father figure for the rest of the band. This song is him heavily scolding Gary Rossington and Allen Collins for two separate DUI car crashes on the same Labor Day weekend. These quotes Ronnie gave to the LA Times in 1976 are interesting: "We were babies when we started this band,” he states, “and, to me, the other guys still are. There was a time when I’d get really drunk in this bar and say, ‘Who is the meanest mother here?’ You got a date with me outside.’ For the hell of it. The other guys are mostly still at that point. They’ll learn.” “It’s a terrible thing when you get behind the wheel and you’re so drunk that you can’t drive a car to begin with. Those boys will pay for it. Allen hit a parked Volkswagen and knocked it across an empty parking lot. That was just a fender-bender compared to Gary’s. I can’t tell you how mad I got at him for that. We’re glad he’s gonna make it, he’s tremendously lucky to be alive… but it was his fault. He passed out at the wheel of his brand new Ford Torino, with his foot on the gas. He knocked down a telephone pole, split an oak tree and did $7,000 worth of damage to a house. That’s being just plain stupid. I told him that on his hospital bed.” Gary Rossington: "Unfortunately, that song is kinda about me and a lot of other people. One night, back when I didn't know any better, I was doing Quaaludes and drinking and went out on Labor Day weekend. I had this friend playing at a teen den, and I took this girl with me. We got crazy, and on the way home I ran into an oak tree, knocked out some teeth and got in trouble. That song's just about getting caught up in the times. We know now that drinking, drugs and shooting means death. That's not what we're about now." Allen Collins' drug and alcohol abuse continued to worsen, sadly, and he had another DUI crash in 1986 that killed his extramarital girlfriend and paralyzed him from the waist down (as well as part of his arms). As part of his plea agreement to avoid prison time, he had to get on stage at every single show on the Tribute Tour and tell the crowd exactly what he'd done and why he'd never be able to play guitar again. He ended up dying of pneumonia related to his paralysis just 4 years later. He was 37. |
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| Rush – Tai Shan Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| Geddy and Alex have both said that repeatedly that this was their least favorite Rush song. I haven't read any of the explanations why except that Geddy said it was "a Neil song" that "just didn't work for him in hindsight". | |
| The Mountain Goats – Dance Music Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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JD's stepfather Mike Noonan terrorized and abused him and his mother for most of his childhood. This is another "confessional" song, and it's exactly what it appears to be: Mike gets abusive, teenaged John hides in his room and takes refuge in his music. There's another song where he talks about Mike trashing his room in an abusive episode. "Break anything you want, just not my record player", is the line as I recall. |
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| The Mountain Goats – Love Love Love Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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It's already been said, but this song demolishes the idea that love is an inherently benign force, the stuff of Hallmark cards and heart-shaped candy boxes. Love of self, love of fame, love of money: all of these things are "love" too, and yet they create havoc and misery whenever they are unleashed. Saul loved power; Joseph's brothers loved money; Liston loved winning; Cobain loved his self-respect. Any lesser emotion would cause a man to pull back at some point. Lose interest, re-evaluate his priorities, take stock of his life. But all of these examples were love pushed to their logical John does a lot of stuff with love pushed far beyond the polite and simple, into a realm of dark and fog where nothing makes sense and hate, fear, jealousy, rage, etc. all enter the mixture and make it into something unique and terrifying, yet still "love" in the broader non-commercial definition of the word. The album Tallahassee is the same thing, just applied to relationships. Hate and love intertwined. JD is a lyrical genius. |
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| Barenaked Ladies – Some Fantastic Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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The protagonist is a scientist, and he's kind of a mad scientist: a man of pure intellect and zero common sense, his lab assistant is the one person in the world he's ever had real love for, and he's incapable of expressing it in any terms other than rigid scientific ones that make him seem bizarre. REadhere in the second verse suggests that they did, in fact, have a romantic relationship, but it failed at some point, likely due to his total inability to express his feelings (and understand hers) like a more normal person. Now that she's gone, he finally realizes that his self-image is forever ruined without her, but his response is to dream up a series of ridiculously elaborate and anti-social ideas to get her to love him again. It's really rather sad, because he knows that he loves her, and knows that her absence makes him feel shitty and empty, but he simply can't understand why or what to do about it, because love is not a quantifiable mathematical concept. So instead he cooks up all these crazy ideas. Reminded me of a scene from a TV show where the Mad Scientist's wife is about to leave him, and shouts at him that she needs "real human affection", to which he replies "Human affection...hmmm...perhaps it can be synthesized, maybe in pill form?" |
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| The Mountain Goats – Last Man on Earth Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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John has always had a really serious love affair with using Christian imagery from the Bible as literary lyrical metaphors for more real and mundane issues central to the human experience, i.e - love, hate, etc. In this case, he's making a double entendre: a common statement of utter and total romantic disinterest is "not if you were the last man on earth". So, of course, John ties this in to Jesus, his betrayal, and his eventual return on Judgment Day as Messiah. The result is something of the "don't count me out" trope expressed in a dualistic Christian context: no matter how long it takes for the day to come, or how many obstacles he must surmount, the narrator fantasizes about that "day of reckoning" when all the liars and falsehoods are stripped away, on which he will be able to say "Now that the liars are all gone, I tell you that I never denied you. I never left you. And I have always loved you" and that will simply be enough, when it was never that simple enough before. John's also a smart dude, so I suspect he realizes that the whole thing is a sad, unlikely fantasy a la BNL's "Some Fantastic" or Henley's "Boys of Summer". What connotations that has for the zeal of John's belief in Christian doctrine remains to be seen. |
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| The Mountain Goats – Idylls of the King Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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This song is in the same vein as "First Few Desperate Hours". It's the gnawing realization that they're already doomed, both as individuals and as a couple. Regardless of what they've been telling each other, they did not move to Tallahassee to find a new life; they moved there to die. The imagery is all evil portents, bad omens, visions of death and decay: Huge crows loitering by the curb Our shared paths unraveling behind us like ribbons And I dreamed of vultures In the trees around our house And cicadas and locusts And the shrieking of innumerable gibbons And he actually breaks down and openly asks: How long will we ride this way about? How long 'til someone caves under the pressure? |
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| The Mountain Goats – Game Shows Touch Our Lives Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Suicide and murder are at the core of the Alphas. They use alcohol as their weapon. The end goal is the same, both of them dead, but the intent varies from song to song. Here, we see them sitting around watching meaningless, shallow game shows while drinking "the lovely little thing on which our survival depends", which they then admit they use to "destroy one another", but that is the most friendly thing they can do. Because they're so alike in their self-hatred. |
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| The Mountain Goats – Have to Explode Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Sad in a way that no other song on Tallahassee is sad. Easily the saddest of the entire Alpha series. In other sad Alpha songs, like No Children, Alpha Rats Nest and Old College Try, there is at least a certain amount of energy; they're fighting and hateful, but in that hate there is at least a certain energy, albeit a dark energy. Here, there is nothing but the silent, drunken, muted misery of bitter nostalgia. Lost opportunities. Failed promise. Knowing that there was never any other way it could have gone, and so you did it anyway. Lots of relationships end in ugliness and hate, but at least there is the ability to remember when you once loved each other, that there was HOPE and you chased that hope until the road ran out. Here, there is nothing but the realization that you've been a couple of corpses since the day you tied the knot. There was never any hope. And that is far worse than simple failure. |
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| The Mountain Goats – No Children Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Nailed it, bro. See people? This is what happens when a person actually CONNECTS with the emotional sentiment expressed in a piece of poetry, instead of merely blank-facing, then saying "I don't get this, so I'm going to insert my own interpretation." |
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| The Mountain Goats – No Children Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes lyrics mean exactly what they say they do. Unless you're a hipster who thinks that nothing is serious or genuine. In which case, "LAWL THIS SONG IS RLY FUNNY!" |
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| The Mountain Goats – No Children Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Ah yes, the old hipster refrain: "Irony means that nothing is ever serious, no sentiment is genuine, and no emotion lasting." Wrong. That's just you. |
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| The Mountain Goats – No Children Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I'm sorry to say that you have absolutely stripped the song of all it's meaning. Have you bothered to read anything John Darnielle has said about this song? Or are you just a pretentious hipster who redefines the meaning of everything he reads or hears to suit his own agenda? You might as well say that Poe's "The Raven" is about a one-legged ice cream salesman, and that makes you laugh and it's a really funny poem. If you can't be bothered to learn the artist's intent behind the words, then you don't really deserve to be commenting on them. |
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| The Mountain Goats – No Children Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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The next person I hear talk about this as a cute, funny, lighthearted, satirical take on marriage is getting punched in the fuckin' nose. The use of an upbeat tempo and tuning is meant to be IRONIC, NOT LITERAL. Of all the people who should understand the concept of irony, it should be you hipster assholes. "There may come a day when you're gonna need the words to this song. You'll be sitting there going, 'What has become of my marriage? This blows.' Right? I want you to remember that I gave you a little something that you could sing, because when that time comes, there won't be much to do besides sing." -John Darnielle, 40 Watt Club, Athens, Georgia, August 10, 2006. |
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| The Mountain Goats – Old College Try Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Next goddamn hipster I hear say "I want this played at my wedding! It's hilarious!" is going to get punched in the nose. Dismissing anything on Tallahassee as light-hearted satire is proof that you're too shallow a human being to understand the depths of what John's dredging. PS - the organ is ironic, not satirical (you dumbasses). The organ gets played at both weddings and funerals. The Alpha's relationship has been one long wedding/funeral since the day it started. |
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| The Mountain Goats – Old College Try Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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"You know how in some operas, usually not the good ones, there'll be some sort of… guy'll come out and basically tell you what to expect… Guy comes out and says "Well, you'll be seeing me and I'll be divorcing my wife and then by the end of the play we'll all be quite miserable and I hope you enjoy it and pay us afterwards." … This song is sort of like that moment from Tallahassee where everybody is announcing that, you know: "Looks as though divorce is what's next for us, eh? Let's get everything lined up for the big ugly divorce, shall we?" And they sort of look each other in the eyes and say "Yes, let's!" -John Darnielle, Remis Auditorium, Boston, October 27, 2005 |
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| Foo Fighters – Let It Die Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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danosdrake: Not sure where your information is coming from. 2007 interview with the Guardian newspaper: "Addressing the claims, Grohl enigmatically explained that the song was "written about feeling helpless to someone else’s demise". Speaking directly about Cobain and Love, he said: "I've seen people lose it all to drugs and heartbreak and death. It's happened more than once in my life, but the one that's most noted is Kurt." Grohl added: "There are a lot of people that I've been angry with in my life, but the one that's most noted is Courtney. So it's pretty obvious to me that those correlations are gonna pop up every now and again." " |
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| Barenaked Ladies – Some Fantastic Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| I've read in several places, including the BNL.com message board, that it's a lost love song about a semi-mad scientist and his lab assistant. They were apparently together for a period, then she punched him in the lip and left. Now he's concocting various schemes to get her back. | |
| Barenaked Ladies – Some Fantastic Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational interpretation. You clumsily shoehorned an utterly unrelated contemporary political issue from 2003 into a song written in 1997. Everyone visiting this song page is now dumber from having been forced to read your words. |
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| Harry Chapin – The Shortest Story Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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Aside from the obvious meaning (starving child), Harry was too much of a lyrical poet to simply leave it there. The greater metaphor is the human condition itself. We are born with the potential for happiness (the "promise under the sun") and in our childhood we actualize that potential. But this is only because we are unburdened the bitter truths of life that time teaches us. By our "seventh day" (end of our childhood), we understand pain, and loss, and hunger. With the dream now beyond our reach forever, we cease even to weep for our losses and learn how to simply "fall asleep" in our lives and stop caring or feeling just to avoid the pain of a reality we cannot change. By our "twentieth day" (around 3x the end of our childhood, so the onset of middle age/retirement) we are suddenly cut off from our only source of support and love ("Mama" being our families, our friends, our jobs, all the things that define us as living people) and cease to have any purpose at all. Our bodies and minds slowly fail with age, we become too weak to cry or move to resist the coming darkness of death. The final question: "Why is there nothing now to do but die?" may as well be "Why does human life come full circle like this?" We begin strong and happy but ignorant, became cold and cynical in order to function once we realize the truth of existence. Now as we weaken and the end draws in sight, we realize suddenly that we've never touched that "promise under the sun" and never will, and with that final knowledge of inescapable failure, we yearn again to cry out like children against the unfairness of it all, and yet we no longer have the strength. |
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| AC/DC – Hells Bells Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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"I don't believe in God or Heaven or Hell. But something happened. We had these little rooms like cells with a bed and a toilet, no TVs. I had this big sheet of paper and I had to write some words. I was going, 'oh fuck.' and I'll never forget, I just went (scribbles frantically as if his hand is possessed). I started writing and never stopped. And that was it, Hells Bells. I had a bottle of whisky and I went [generous gulps]. I kept the light on all night, man." -Brian Johnson, Q Magazine, Nov. 2008 I've also heard their apartment in Jamaica got hit with a bad thunderstorm while he wrote as well. |
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| The Mountain Goats – Pale Green Things Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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All of John's songs on Sunset Tree are about his childhood, and most involve his stepfather, Mike Noonan, in some context, specifically the bitterness, fear, rebelliousness and general damage to John's spirit produced by his stepfather's frequent physical and emotional abuse of John's mother and himself during his teenaged years in the early 80s. Pale Green Things is the same topic, but a vastly different emotion. Anybody who has ever had an abusive/neglectful/addicted parent will understand. Parents influence our lives more than any other person, and something about that relationship (the "living Chinese finger trap") forces us to consider the results of this impact even long after the physical influence is gone. For children of abuse, this is especially hard to swallow. In many ways, they bear physical and emotional scars of their abuse and all they want is to feel loved by the abusive parent, even long after they've realized it's impossible. John built a life of his own after Mike Noonan, but the harder he pulled to get away, the more he couldn't forget what living under him was like. In December 2004, Noonan died "at last, at last?" and John got the phone call at 3am that simultaneously fulfilled his deepest, bitterest childhood wish that his stepfather die, but also stimulated an instantaneous recall of one of the few "good" moments he had with him. This is actually a common phenomenon when an abusive parent or spouse dies; there is a need to remember something good or valuable about the relationship so that the entire period spent under the abuser's control isn't seen to have been "wasted", or "meaningless". John's random memory of that pre-dawn morning at the track with his stepson was the little tuft of pale green Indiana sawgrass, peeking through the hard, broken asphalt of his stepfather's nature. It was literally the straw John's memory drew in that moment when his mind asked say "My stepfather is dead. Is there anything good I remember about him now?" |
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| The Mountain Goats – Pale Green Things Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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Absolutely agree. This was my first impression as well. Most of his songs about his stepfather deal with the fear, bitterness and rebelliousness his stepfather's abusive alcoholism produced in him. Those sensations are easy to explain. But this one is different; anybody who has ever had an abusive/neglectful/addicted parent will understand. Human beings define themselves by their parents, for better or worse. There's an instinctual need to cling to the little things that make even the worst parents worthwhile as a human being, no matter how small they may be. Amid the constant memories of the misery, fear and chaos of his childhood with his stepdad, it's not until John hears he "finally died" (John's glad, and nobody could blame him) that he suddenly remembers this rare and unexpected moment of kindness and humanity in a relationship that was so defined by it's domination and inhumanity. That morning with his stepson was the little tuft of pale green Indiana sawgrass, peeking through the hard, broken asphalt of his stepfather's nature. And as anybody who's been there can tell you, those rare moments are memorable too. |
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