| Neutral Milk Hotel – Engine Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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--Correction: "For I am an engine and I'm **rolling** on" --Interpretation: This song is about the fleeting nature of beauty. "For I am an engine and I'm rolling on Through endless revisions to state what I mean For sweetness alone who flew out through the window And landed back home in a garden of green" This singer is in a tongue-tied, in a state of disbelief after a loved one leaves him. He refers to her simply as "sweetness". It could be a woman. It could also be a more general embodiment of the concept of beauty. "You're riding alone in the back of a steamer And steaming yourself in the warm shower spray And water rolls on off the round captain's belly Who's talking to tigers from his cafeteria tray" His love is leaving and doing so in a beautiful way. NMH lyrics create wonderful imagery. It's probably not useful to try too hard to tie this verse to the theme of the song. Just enjoy the pictures it puts in you're head. "And sweet babies cry for the cool taste of milking That milky delight that invited us all And if there's a taste in this life more inviting Then wake up your windows and watch as those sweet babies crawl away" There are 2 parallels between this and the first verse. 1) "Sweet babies" and "Sweetness". Babies grow up. At first, they like the "cool taste of milking", but as toddlers, they give it up and crawl away. They move on to "a taste more inviting" and move forward in life. This explains the singer's loved one left as well. She had to fly away to a better place. 2) "Sweetness alone flew out through the window" and "Wake up you're windows". In the first verse, the singer doesn't know how to feel about his loved one leaving. In the last verse, he has come to terms with it. He even instructs the listener to open our windows and let beauty leave us. This is because the nature of beauty is fleeting. We too were once babies who crawled away from our mother's milk for a taste more inviting. If we want to move forward and leave things behind (and we do), we must accept that sweetness will leave us as well. All things change. Well, I think I've had enough beer for one night. |
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| Tame Impala – It Is Not Meant to Be Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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It's possible this song is just about being physically attracted to someone you have no emotional compatibility with... But I think it goes deeper. This is Tame Impala we're talking about. The lyrics draw a sharp contrast between the narrator and his crush. So who should we identify with? I will introduce 2 possibilities: 1) He is a lazy slacker and she is a driven goddess who is out of his league. 2) She is a stuck up bitch and he's the one who actually knows how to enjoy life. At first, you are led to believe that the second point is true. "She doesn't like sand stuck on her feet", shows that she doesn't know how to enjoy the simple pleasures in life. I think we all know one of those success-driven people who wouldn't be happy to just "sit by the lake" and kill time (sounds incredible to me). "Her soul won't surface"- I take this to mean she keeps her emotions hidden. "She doesn't make friend's for friendship's sake"- She is self-serving, not very compassionate. This might make her seem undesirable, but the singer sees something incredible in her. Really, its something he doesn't recognize in himself. In the last verse, the singer reflects on himself in the 3rd person. It sounds a bit self-disparaging: "And I thought they could cure his disease, but in all honesty, he didn't have a hope in hell, now we'll never see him move" He'll never "move" like her. This hit me like a ton of bricks the first time I heard it. But I'm not totally convinced that his "disease" is such a bad thing. In light of the earlier verses, her life is not necessary preferable to his. I think its just a reflection on 2 drastically different lifestyles. The singer can't comprehend a life so different from his, but he finds her beautiful. "I'm happy just to watch her move" Nothing fascinates us like the things we can't understand. |
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