| Dave Matthews Band – Rhyme & Reason Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| I mostly agree with what other people have said, that it's describing drug addiction or the obsessive-compulsive mindset. In the latter case, I think the lyrics at the end refer to the death of the speaker, either from suicide or possibly abusing drugs to try to escape the obsessive urges. | |
| Dave Matthews Band – I Did It Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| I think this song is about doing something good for selfish reasons, and then being surprised when it has ripple effects. | |
| Dave Matthews Band – Dreams of Our Fathers Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| I see this song as being about how our thoughts and behaviors are shaped by those who came before us, and although we all want to be our own person, the lyrics seem extremely pessimistic about the prospect of ever breaking completely out of that mold. | |
| Talking Heads – Once In A Lifetime Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| It seems as though this song is making the case that people are under tremendous pressure (both self-imposed and societal) to simply accept what they've been given in life and what turns their life takes without questioning it or thinking too hard about it, but that the only way to truly learn and grow and make the most of your life is to constantly ask questions and think about what it might be adding up to. The water is a symbol for the desire to sleepwalk through life, which must be broken free from in order to truly live. | |
| Billy Joel – Pressure Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| I partly agree with what other people are saying--I can see it being about growing up and having to deal with the "real world" without knowing how to handle yourself. But I also get from it that the pressure people are under is really relentless, so after you've been out in the world for awhile you could crack and end up in "Psych 1, Psych 2," or whatever. | |
| Iron Maiden – Sign of the Cross Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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I think this song tells the story of a man from the Middle Ages who was born Jewish but converted to Christianity under pressure from the Christian leaders. However, as a result of this he cut himself off from his former community, and his Christian peers don't accept him because they think he's still a Jew deep down, hence "Why am I meant to face this alone?" and etc. Even he isn't sure if converting was the right decision, and he wonders if God is angry at him for abandoning his people ("Why then is God still protecting me/Even when I don't deserve it?"). Eventually, church officials accuse him of "relapsing," and he confesses and is killed, but he realizes that they were the ones who put him up to all this in the first place, and they are the ones God will ultimately punish ("They'll be saying their prayers when the moment comes/There'll be penance to pay when it's Judgement Day"). Seems to be in a similar vein to "Hallowed Be Thy Name," actually, both in terms of the lyrical progression and the arrangement. |
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| Iron Maiden – Heaven Can Wait Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| Upon further consideration, it seems like this song is presenting kind of a Jewish view of heaven. Jews have a long-standing tradition of believing in an afterlife but it's not considered especially important--what really matters is living as fulfilling a life as you can. In fact, the accepted wisdom (in most cases) is that you won't be in a position to fully appreciate what's on the other side unless you've made the most of your own life. Lyrics like "I can't believe, that really my time has come/I don't feel ready, there's so much left undone" and "'Cause I've no fear of dying, I'll go when I'm good and ready" relate to this idea--he knows there's SOMETHING on the other side, and he's not afraid per se; but he doesn't want to die right now because he'd rather live a full life first. I've even seen articles and stories on Jewish websites and the like that are expressly titled something like "Heaven can wait" or else that follow very similar storylines to this song. | |
| Iron Maiden – Wrathchild Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| There is a school of thought, I think, that this song is a metaphor for trying to find yourself. See, for instance, the lyrics "And now I spend my time searching all around/For a man who's nowhere to be found," and especially "I know I've got to find, some serious peace of mind, or I know I'll go crazy." | |
| Iron Maiden – Hallowed Be Thy Name Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| @[BoneWeapon:2266] Going off of what you're saying here, exactly why this man is about to be executed has so little to do with the rest of the song that I think in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't even matter whether he's going to die by hanging, or if he were to die of some other cause. In fact, I'd take it one step further and say I don't even think the gallows pole mentioned in the song has to be literal--it could just as easily be a metaphor for death in general. | |
| The Decemberists – The Rake's Song Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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This song does make this guy seem like the most un-self-aware person in the whole world, doesn't it? I imagine him relating this tale to a group of his drinking buddies, and then wondering why they start giving him worried looks and backing away slowly! It seems like there's a bit of an elemental theme to the way he treats his children, I think. Consider: First child: fed a poisonous plant (Earth) Second child: drowned in a bathtub (Water) Third child: burned (Fire) I bring this up because unlike a lot of bad guys in this type of story this one seems to be as in-tune with nature as the heroes are--we know he can communicate with William's forest-spirit mother, for one thing. |
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| Iron Maiden – Paschendale Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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I have to disagree with people who say this is a neutral song about war that doesn't pass judgement on it. I think this is, if anything, more of an anti-war protest song than some of their other offerings like "The Trooper" or even "The Longest Day." I support this assertion thusly: Note that a song like "The Trooper," for example, tells the tale of a battle by putting you inside the head of a soldier, and that's all it is. "The Longest Day," while it flits in and out of the head of a single soldier, still limits itself to that particular battlefield and its immediate consequences. "Paschendale" is different, though, because it has a (comparatively) long introduction to who this soldier was. In addition to the graphic lyrics talking about war, the song spends a long, long time describing the importance of listening to this soldier's story, of "Tell[ing] the tale of Paschendale." In other words, this song is meant to be at least part cautionary tale, about how it's important to remember the terrible bits of history and just how awful they really were because those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Seeing as a lot of the songs on "Dance of Death" have social messages of some kind, it seems as though this song is making a statement about just how ugly things can get when people (in this case, the powers that precipitated World War I) allow their ignorance, hate, and desire for war to blind them ("Montsegur," also from this album, is the same). |
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| Metallica – Master of Puppets Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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Upon further consideration, I wonder if this song couldn't work as a metaphor for anxiety disorders, such as OCD? Consider: "Veins that pump with fear Sucking darkest clear" This could be taken to represent an extreme anxiety/panic attack. "Come crawling faster Obey your master" According to patients and professionals working with OCD, it feels like having a demon on your shoulder, urging you to do something or face consequences, and if you ignore the demon it'll keep nagging at you but if you do what it wants it'll control you all the more. "Master of Puppets I'm pulling your strings Twisting your mind and smashing your dreams Blinded by me you can't see a thing Just call my name 'cause I'll hear you scream Master, Master" When anxiety rules your life, you'll do anything to make it go away, even structuring your life around it. "Pain monopoly, ritual misery Chop your breakfast on a mirror" Could be taken as a metaphor for OCD compulsions, where you feel you have to perform rituals or face consequences. The second line could be one example of a compulsion, where everything has to be prepared perfectly or the victim can't even eat breakfast in the morning. "Master, Master, where's the dreams that I've been after?" Again, how anxiety can rule your life and leave you with no time or energy for any of your goals or aspirations. "Master, Master, you promised only lies." Could be a statement about how OCD "promises" that bad things will happen if rituals, etc. are not performed, even though a moment's rational thought will tell you that it isn't true. "Laughter, laughter, all I hear or see is laughter Laughter, laughter, laughing at my cries" Could symbolize the people who don't understand sufferers of anxiety disorders, and so laugh at or otherwise make light of their plight, since anxiety disorders may force you to do degrading or humiliating things in an attempt to make the anxiety stop. "Hell is worth all that Natural habitat Just a rhyme without a reason" This could be from the perspective of a person with OCD, giving into his compulsions despite knowing they don't make sense, because they've become a habit. "I will occupy I will help you die I will run through you Now I rule you too" If anxiety disorders go untreated they'll eventually get worse and worse until they consume your entire life--and ultimately could even shorten your lifespan (because you're harming/not taking good care of yourself, or from suicide...). I apologize if this offends anyone. I suffer from anxiety myself, and based a lot of my comments on mental-health resources and a book my therapist recommended to me about OCD. |
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| Iron Maiden – Rainmaker Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| I think people are right when they say that the rain is a metaphor for healing in one's life, but I don't think it's limited to just one person, or even a couple. My take on this song is that it's a call for everyone in the world to do better ("And I know, of the pain, that you feel the same as me"), and that if enough people do the right sorts of things ("You tell me we can start the rain/You tell me that we all can change"), the entire world can be healed and become a better place, like a desert after the rain. | |
| Iron Maiden – Die With Your Boots On Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I agree with addseale2--a big undercurrent in this song is, essentially, "Pay no attention to people who say the end is near." You can see this in lyrics like "Predicting war for millions/In the hope that one appears." What the song really seems to be saying is that nobody can truly know if or when the world is going to end, and it's not worth fussing over it. Also that the problems that could lead to disasters are things to solve and work through, rather than wring your hands about: "The truth of all predictions/Is always in our hands." The chorus, with its "Die with your boots on" is just describing what to do IF IT COMES TO THAT. But the narrator doesn't see it as a given that it will. You may notice as well, that the song repeats "If you're gonna die" many, many times over--and the more it repeats it the less likely it sounds. It starts to sound rather like a conversation with a scared kid going "Yes, Mom, but IF that terrible, horrible thing happens?" |
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| The Decemberists – This Is Why We Fight Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| I know this wasn't intentional, but to me at least this song seems to be about some sort of apocalypse. The song says "Come hell" so many times that even for a "war is hell" type of message it seems overwrought, and after a certain point it gets harder to interpret in any way but literally. In addition, the lyrics say "When we die/We will die/With our arms unbound." Not, note, "IF we die," but "WHEN we die"--suggesting there isn't anyone involved here who has any real hope of ever coming back alive. So to me this song is about an upcoming fight so brutal and all-encompassing that most if not all people will perish in it, either from the war itself or from its aftereffects. The narrator is about to go out and die because dying in such an awful war is better than having to live through the destruction and oppression that will follow. Sounds pretty apocalyptic to me. | |
| Metallica – Master of Puppets Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| I wonder if, among other things, this song includes the message that drug addiction is passed on through generations or peer groups? I'm thinking of the lyric "Now I rule you too." I don't see how that could be about the "puppet" specifically because he's already addicted. Instead, it seems like it's implying that the "master" has managed to take control of someone else. To me that's trying to make the point that if you do drugs, your friends or family are more at risk of copying you and doing them as well, which creates more victims for the "master of puppets." | |
| Iron Maiden – Montségur Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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This is probably my favorite song on "Dance of Death," and seems to be following in the tradition of "Run to the Hills" and the like as an incredibly badass song dealing with an incredibly terrible topic. I don't think this is a condemnation of religion outright. One of the points it makes is that the innocent victims here were religious people themselves, who are choosing to die rather than relinquish their faith ("The Perfect ones willingly died at the stake"). If there are religious wars, crusades, or whatever most of the people who suffer are not non-religious people (though they may get caught up in it all as well) but other religious/spiritual people who do not practice the dominant religion. The answer, therefore, is not to do away with religion necessarily but to simply stop fighting over it. |
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| Iron Maiden – Run To The Hills Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I know it's a school of thought that each of the songs on this album is about one of the Seven Deadly Sins (except "Hallowed Be Thy Name," which is about paying for your sins, and possibly also "The Number of the Beast"), and in that context I think this song represents greed, since at bottom it seems to be about white settlers taking the Native Americans' land and resources for their own gain and killing them when they resisted. With that being said, I think it's pretty clear that it's presenting what the white people did in a NEGATIVE light. Yes you get their point of view, but the narrative itself never makes any attempt to gloss over or excuse their bad behavior, and what we do get sounds really unpleasant no matter whose point of view it's coming from. I'm pretty sure the white people whose viewpoint is employed are meant to be seen as unreliable narrators at best. And, really, whatever the native tribes might have been like or not, it doesn't take a genius to see that enslaving and genociding people is wrong, period. |
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| Iron Maiden – 22 Acacia Avenue Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| This song is particularly interesting in light of the sheer numbers of rock and metal songs that deal with women, especially the songs dealing with sex with women. Most of them are written by men who take it as a given (rightly or wrongly) that these women will want to have sex with them, or were perfectly happy to make men of them if it's a song about the past, or whatever. Then you have a song like this that's pointing out, look, this prostitute, who has lots of sex with lots of men (including, presumably, people like the band members) has feelings too and is actually ill-used by the men in her life--the song goes out of its way to point out in that one section ("Beat her, mistreat her" thru to "She always does what you want") that most of the men who visit Charlotte don't consider her thoughts or feelings at all, but are just using her for whatever it is THEY want. It seems like an admonishment that actually, that kind of attitude toward women, which a sizable chunk of rock was promoting or does promote, is really, really fucked up! | |
| Iron Maiden – 22 Acacia Avenue Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| @[Marco88:729] Honestly I've been to that website and it's not that great. Anything it can do this website can do better. | |
| Iron Maiden – Lord of Light Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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At the risk of making an unpopular pronouncement, I don't think this song necessarily portrays Lucifer as a good guy. I think he's still a villain of a sort even here, though a tragic villain rather than simply an evil monster. I would even go so far as to say that, in some respects, this song does present (some manner of) faith/spirituality in a positive light, or at least takes it as a given--I say this because of its lyrical similarities with "Hallowed Be Thy Name" and "The Thin Line Between Love and Hate," both of which present faith in a positive light ("Catch my soul, it's willing to fly away" vs. "I have hope, my soul will fly, and I will live forever" vs. "Free your soul and let it fly"). With that said, here's my take on this song. It has two main narrators: one is Lucifer (whose lyrics are denoted with "I" and "me"), and the other is a person (or possibly a group of people) who are going to Lucifer for guidance (their lyrics are denoted by "us" and "we"). The setup, I think, is that these people are fed up with atrocities being committed in God's name ("We are part of some strange plan/Why the slaughter of the brotherhood of man") and being told that they'll never measure up to God, and so forth, and because they think they can no longer turn to God for help they go to Lucifer instead in the hopes that he can advise them, given his own experiences with rebelling against God and evil and sin and such ("Lucifer was just an angel led astray"). So they go to visit Lucifer, confessing that they've done wrong by him, committing sins of various sorts and then blaming them all on him rather than owning up to them ("And all our sins to you we give this day"). And they hope that he'll help them. But Lucifer can't help them either. He doesn't really understand humans or why they do the things they do, and can't look upon their problems with a human eye ("You don't see this strange world/Quite the same as me"), nor does he have any real power to put things right, as he is a being of evil himself, which he admonishes these people for not realizing ("Don't deny me what I am/Nothing hidden still you fail to see the truth"). Instead, he entreats these people not to make the same mistakes he has and let themselves be consumed by sin, because they have potential and while it's too late for him it's not too late for them ("Free your soul and let it fly/Mine was caught, I couldn't try"). The chorus is Lucifer's ultimate prescription to these people, and to me there's two ways to interpret it, neither one of which I favor particularly strongly over the other. The first interpretation is that Lucifer is doing some reverse psychology and being a bit of an unreliable narrator, saying, "Yes I know I can't really help you and don't particularly understand you, but you should serve me anyway (hence, "Give your life to the Lord of Light"). This to me would not be terribly out-of-character for Lucifer, since after all he is traditionally a tempter of sinners and does need followers of his own. The second part of the chorus, per this interpretation, is basically an admonishment not to let others know that they're doing his bidding. The other interpretation is that Lucifer does truly want the best for these people, and when he says "Free your soul and let it fly" he means that they should put their sins behind them and resolve to do better from now on, and find a spirituality that works for them, and what he means by "Give your life to the Lord of Light" is not that they should dedicate themselves to him per se, but to remember what he used to be (since Lucifer was once the mightiest angel before rebelling against God), and be the best that they can be. In this case, the second half of the chorus is basically him saying, "Keep your secrets FROM ME, because I don't want them and wouldn't know what to do with them in any case." The last verse I think could be from the perspective of the people or could be Lucifer speaking for himself and the fallen angels but I don't think the meaning of the song changes in either case. To me, the takeaway message here is that religion/spirituality/whatever can enslave or it can set free, and the trick is to find a way of negotiating it that leads to the latter, and not the former. |
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| Iron Maiden – Starblind Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| I happen to think that this song's position on the album is quite significant. On the album it comes from it follows right after "Isle of Avalon." Seeing as that song is about being returned to the earth for rebirth, the mother goddess, and so forth and so on to me that song and this one taken together form a sort of yin and yang. | |
| Iron Maiden – Heaven Can Wait Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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To me this song is a sort of spiritual successor to "Hallowed Be Thy Name." It seems to have a couple similarities to it musically and lyrically, but in this song the narrator lives while in the former case he dies. What I find really powerful is the segment where God, I believe, speaks to the narrator and calls him to "the promised land," where he'll be given immortality and eternal youth and presumably heavenly bliss--yet he turns it down because he's simply not ready to die yet. It's not that he doesn't believe in an afterlife (it seems pretty clear from his experience that in the universe he inhabits one exists)--he just wants to live out his full life before leaving it ("I'm not scared of dying/I'll go when I'm good and ready"), in marked contrast to "Hallowed Be Thy Name's" line about life being "just a strange illusion" that can be taken from you without anything of value being lost. But this character has a choice about whether or not to die, whereas the narrator of "Hallowed Be Thy Name" had no choice. One other interesting thing vis-a-vis "Hallowed Be Thy Name" is that in this song God, who is supposedly all-powerful and all-knowing, can say "the path for you is decided" and have it turn out to be empty words, but in "Hallowed Be Thy Name" the narrator was powerless to escape his death at the hands of his fellow men. It seems to set the tone for a number of their other works, which suggest that God is mostly passive, and may approve or disapprove of any given situation but won't do anything to prevent it or influence it one way or the other. |
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| Iron Maiden – Hallowed Be Thy Name Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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In my view, the first thing to keep in mind about this song is that its narrator is almost certainly young. I support this statement thusly: 1) The song was written when the band members were relatively young. Write what you know and all that. 2) The lyrical structure, where its age is identifiable, seems to be fairly youthful (see, for instance, lyrics such as "Is this really the end not some crazy dream?" "Somebody please tell me that I'm dreaming" and "though the end is near I'm not sorry"). 3) The narrator is completely and utterly terrified of his death, at least initially, whereas an older and wiser person might face death with a bit more dignity. 4) The narrator is a religious person, but has to remind himself of this fact ("Tears flow but why am I crying/After all I'm not afraid of dying/Don't I believe that there never is an end?"). This suggests that his religion isn't something he's owned after a lifetime of trial and error, but is something he's simply never had the time to think about or question. 5) When he's trying to comfort himself about his death, the only thing he bothers to mention is that he thinks he'll go to a better place afterwards--he doesn't talk about his life accomplishments, or about any children he has who could carry on his legacy, or the name he's made for himself in the world, which suggests he hasn't had the time for any of those things. So there you have it. Fundamentally I think this song is about a young person who knows he is going to die and there's nothing he can do about it. He's trying to come to terms with the fact that his life is being cut short long before his time, and before he's had the chance to really make anything of his life. This is also why it's so easy for him to say "Life down there is just a strange illusion"--he hasn't had the time to build up a list of things that would tie him to the world so it's easier for him to convince himself that he can leave it without suffering any great loss. Notice that the older the band members get (and by extension, the older their protagonists get), the less they seem to believe this to be true. At the same time, though, I do think it's significant that the song presents religion and spirituality in a positive light, even if it is in the context of providing comfort to a young person on death row. |
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