| Sufjan Stevens – Fourth of July Lyrics | 6 years ago |
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I think the song is about him as a boy catching fireflies on the Fourth of July in Tilamook State Forest while visiting his mother in Oregon one summer. The Tilamook Burn was the site of a series of wildfires that ravaged that part of Oregon from 1933 to 1951 and, after the area rebounded, was renamed the Tilamook State Forest in 1973. Not sure if anyone has ever done this, but we used to catch live fireflies in mason jars or our cupped hands as a kid. While marveling at their bio-luminescence, those captured insects wouldn't live long and I imagine it was the same for Sufjan who later wrote this song as an elegy to those beautifully doomed creatures whose memory has been likened here to that of his dying mother. This song really haunts me as it seems to capture a child's momentary contemplation of the death of all things and the briefness an fragility of life itself. |
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| M83 – Wait Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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While my first feelings about this song are about love and coming to terms with the end can I 'flip the field' on this by providing another angle? Given that these lyrics are about an "ending", if you couple those haunting screams at the climax with what's happening in the world today it makes me think about the lonely plight of a suicide bomber in the moments before they....ignite. What if those people are motivated not by hatred, but by some extreme and twisted form of love that few of us can imagine? |
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| Bon Iver – Holocene Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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To me the song describes the last moments of a man who has just been in motorcycle accident and is dying on the highway on a cold Halloween night in Milwaukee. As responders try to revive him (shake it! fake it! stick with us!), his last thoughts are of him making peace with what's just happened. As his mind wanders, he reflects on past moments in his life that were meaningful to him for which he acquires a new found humility (I was not magnificent). And like the accident that physically threw him to his death, the act of dying has also given him spiritual flight which allows him to, "See for miles and miles." Even the peppering of clarinets in one passage seems reminiscent of cackling birds nearby, which seems to lend us a sense of ‘altitude’ as we soar with the dying man during his last moments. While the word "Holocene" can be defined as the present epoch of geologic time, it also represents the relatively short age of mankind's ascendance in the world. In one sense Bon Iver’s song "Holocene" reminds us of the short amount of time we all have as individuals to live, love and learn. But I also think this work is an allegory for eventual passing of human civilization - for like every epoch of world history our "Holocene" will eventually come to an end. And in that end perhaps humanity will have a similar moment of clarity, like the man dying on the road. |
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