| Iron Maiden – Wrathchild Lyrics | 7 months ago |
| That this song follows over directly from an instrumental called "The Ides of March" suggests to me that maybe it is a fictionalized account of the anger of an illegitimate son of Julius Caesar by the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. He was involved with her before Mark Antony was. Obviously it wasn't the "wrathchild" that finally killed Caesar, though, so that aspect of the combination is a little puzzling. Another possibility could be that he's actually trying to hunt down Caesar's killers even though his father "abandoned" him and his mother. | |
| UFO – Rock Bottom Lyrics | 3 years ago |
| I have a completely different interpretation of this song than the others I'm seeing. I think the "17, nature's queen" and "21, the lone one" are the same person, that being a girl who was once very popular and a few years ago and finds she's now alone and in a hard world, and she can't deal with it. So, she commits suicide. Then, someone else, a man, comes along and sees her dead body and pretty face, and thinks it's a terrible shame--he might have wanted to know her--and he wonders if her act has condemned her in what might be her afterlife. | |
| Porcupine Tree – Even Less Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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I've just heard the version on the Recordings album which has the lines given elsewhere on the site for "Part 2." In the lines above (Part 1), the narrator seems to be singing about a friend who has committed suicide by drowning himself. He wanted to help his friend, but his help was not well received. His friend thought he was cold, but he understood "But for the grace of God goes another man," which the narrator (who judging by the lyrics in Part 2 is probably an atheist) interprets to mean "the Universe is capricious and what happens to you depends a lot on chance." What's interesting to me is that the narrator seems angry with his departed (choirboy, i.e. religious) friend. The lines about some people should be left to fend for themselves and others were meant to stack shelves seems to suggest that he's angry at his friend for placing his faith in biblical authority rather than thinking for himself. In Part 2, where he says "fuck you and your book too," he is saying "your beliefs were worthless because they weren't even enough to keep you from killing yourself." The final two lines of Part 1 basically seem to be saying: "I may be doing nothing with my life because of my own suffering, but you had a better life than me and you still threw it away." In the first lines of Part 2, he scorns his friend's futile religion and perhaps is trying to comfort himself somewhat by saying: "At least I will leave behind something for posterity (my music) when I'm gone." But in the last lines of Part 2, it's as if his anger at his friend turns inward. He sees his inability to save his friend as being yet another example of how he is unable to make a positive difference, and that feeling of futile existence ends the song. The second line of "I had a stupid dream that I could change things / But I'm a martyr to even less." is a little hard to interpret: what is he a martyr to here? My best guess is that he's saying that he's killing himself (emotionally) over things that are less distressing than the failure of his optimistic idea that he had the power to change things. But that lack of power to change things for the better seems to be what's eating at him. |
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