| Circa Survive – Get Out Lyrics | 6 years ago |
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I feel like there shouldn't be a comma in the chorus. I hear it as: I can't wait to understand the reason I have yet to translate any meaning besides "it's not worth it to try" the bleakness hits me harder this way |
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| Silversun Pickups – Mercury Lyrics | 6 years ago |
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I think that the title "Mercury" refers to the Roman deity (aka Hermes or Turms) in his role as a psychopomp (escort for recently deceased souls to the afterlife), although I think it's more of an allusion to the personification of death itself rather than a reference to the mythological entity. To me, this song is all about trying to continue living after the death of a loved one. Death doesn't grieve the dead with you, it just "looks forward" to it's next victim and "leaves you to fill in" the gaps of confusion brought on by the fact that someone who was with you before is now absent forever. The "pile of damaged goods" refers to one's psychological and emotional state after such a loss. The refrain of "it's my way" and the question "Do I still enjoy to watch it all go haywire?" refers to death's unchanging consistency: no one has ever escaped death's grasp. The question also addresses death's way of plunging someone's previously routine existence into utter chaos. "Promise to move again so you can return to whatever it is that you did" kind of forms the thesis for the whole song: Death doesn't stick around, and you need to try to carry on living after death departs, despite the pain and hopelessness you might feel. Easily the most painful truth of the song: how are you possibly supposed to continue doing the menial things that previously seemed so important after you've lost someone close to you, especially with the realization of existential/cosmic horror that death could come again for someone else you love, or even you. Death is "the way we all learn to divide" and "the only way out of the drought" of life (Needs little-to-no elaboration in my opinion). The most disturbing part of this all is that "you'll never know why" you have to experience such suffering and heartbreak. "moving closer...towards our final goal" also needs little elaboration. "Disappear into blame" is a little confusing, but I'm guessing that it refers to death itself as our greatest nemesis. "Till we meet again" is a grim-but-telling farewell: death's always going to come back. "thank heavens, you don't see it my way" refers again to death's adversarial role: Death, personified, would consider its role to be of massive importance, otherwise it wouldn't work so hard to accomplish it so unfailingly. But the living value life with a similar sense of importance: the majority of our efforts get spent on creating and sustaining life, so we don't share death's perspective. This truth foreshadows the next few lines: in our efforts to sustain life, we've created machines and devices that can do that for us. But the irony is that, like us, those machines are subject to decay and can't escape their own inevitable demise, and they'll only prolong us as long as they don't "die" themselves. Bleak interpretation perhaps, but it's a bleak song. My dog is slowly dying from cancer, so death was on my mind when I listened to this song, and that's when it all clicked. |
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| Silversun Pickups – Skin Graph Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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This song seems to set the mood for the entire album, which is known for it's themes of splintered or alternating personalities and the memories of the horrors involved in growing up. It's difficult to ascertain whether the first verse is referring to literal "overexposed" lights, floor-marks, and an "explosive" place behind a door, or if these are simply tangible interpretations of psychological or figurative constructs. In the case of trauma victims, literal and figurative interpretations both tend to express the terror of individual realities. I imagine the singer (arguably someone other than Brian) standing in a place where very painful experiences played out, a place that (s)he has been away from for a great deal of time. The overexposed lights and "marks on the floor" seem familiar in an unsettling way. The marks leading to the door give a sense that someone had been dragged kicking and screaming through the door at some point. Upon viewing the door, the singer is hit with an "explosive" wave of recollection, traumatic stress, and emotion, which he/she cannot avoid reliving after years of trying to repress them. The singer comes "back," punching the air after awakening from the nightmare of the memories, again giving us the sense of helplessness that (s)he cannot escape from. (S)he expresses this episode as a "sneak attack" to "disrupt and smear" all the "laid tracks" or hard work that was put into suppressing the memories and emotions in order to appear normal and functional. When the singer claims to have broken off from the pavement, we are given a sense of dissociation, as if (s)he is frantically and unconsciously trying to disconnect from everything associated with the trauma, but nonchalantly laments that (s)he is merely a broken off piece of a whole being, hinting at the aforementioned splintered personality. The next verse describes the birth of a new personality or "new skin" and it's desire to have control without having to share this control with the other selves. It is fully aware of the other selves, and "disables the muscles and bones so they won't try to walk on their own." The newly reborn personality fulfills it's function by having "nothing to hide" effectively repressing the traumatic memories once again in a cycle that is continually repeated. The line "the ground I want to explore doesn't feel like before" indicates that this rebirth, though having occurred many times before, is different in a way. The singer then laments that this "new skin" feels ordinary, and perhaps a bit uninteresting. An indeterminate "you" (perhaps a friend, love interest, parental figure or even self) likes things that "don't grow inside" the singer because of his/her fractured nature and the suppressed experiences that would otherwise accompany the development of identity. Because these experiences are buried so deeply, the singer realized that (s)he is nothing but an empty shell of a person, which is the cost of living life this way. |
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