| ABBA – The Day Before You Came Lyrics | 1 year ago |
| @carenp26 The working title for the song, before it was properly titled, was Swedish for 'The Suffering Bird' not an actual bird, but a lady, and she's a suffering woman. So the song is really just a metaphor. The whole thing is a metaphor. The lyrics are basically just grounding the plot into some kind of connectivity to life as most people know it. But the song itself is supposed to invoke feelings and ideas, and things deep down inside the listener. | |
| ABBA – The Day Before You Came Lyrics | 1 year ago |
| @insdiyenateist That's what comes through the most, and has been said before by many, that the song is more of a "wishful thinking" than it was an actual event. The routine is still there, the usual is all she's mentioning, but there's virtually no mention of "who" is actually the one who arrives on the scene. The "you" could very well mean it's just an image of "somebody" but there's nothing there to speak about who it is or what this somebody does. | |
| ABBA – The Day Before You Came Lyrics | 1 year ago |
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@discobiscu You obviously don't speak English as a first language, since you didn't get that what she meant by "being blue" is a metaphor for being depressed, sad, and lonely. And there are many inconsistencies with your theory. As entertaining as it would be to have the protagonist to have killed someone (maybe a rapist, since the mention of Marilyn French is a weird allusion to this as she did write once that men were rapists) it's not what the lyrics are conveying at all. Also you didn't pick up on the fact that she lit her seventh cigarette in the afternoon implying she had smoked several times during the day. A habit of smoking. It didn't mean she had seven cigarettes all at once. And being as how she took a train to get to work, how would she go off somewhere with a body in tow? The lost hour or so of her from going home from work could be that she took a walk or that when she stopped to get Chinese food, that it did take a while. She could have walked to a Chinese take out joint to obtain it, or taken the bus, or whatever the case was. She just wanted Chinese food. She also mentions living without aim, which means one of two things. That she had no sense (or awareness) of living like a robot or a slave (to the system) and she was just realizing that, or that she had no sense of living on the edge (meaning she plots her daily life just as a routine) but I opt for the first meaning. She didn't really know how much of a rut she was in. Before someone came along. That someone could have actually ruined her life, and she was now living a different life and remembering how her life *was* before, maybe even grieving a bit. Her life was boring and mundane but at least it was *her* life. Also in standard practice, a cop or a detective, would not be coming to her so soon. They have to do things like autopsies and contact anyone connected to any murder victim first. So your theory, while wild and entertaining, is full of holes. |
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| Al Stewart – Helen and Cassandra Lyrics | 7 years ago |
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This song is one of those rare moments when an actual vibration from the past stirs within the listener. Anyone even remotely familiar with The Iliad or The Odyssey will take to this song and remember all the words almost immediately. There are many things that stand out about this track and one is the odd way that the singer is telling about this epic tale in two parts as of each character in the title. He opens with the lead in that we are about to hear a tale that's at the fringes of our memory, i.e. we've all heard about it before. As he begins the first part, the character he introduces is Helen and he tells her tale. But he's singing about her in the third person as he lays out the events that lead up to the Trojan War and then ties it off in a sort of musing that perhaps none of it ever happened. But when he introduces the second character from his title, he doesn't speak *of* her, he speaks *to* her. He's talking directly to her and asking her what she knew and what she saw. And it's in this part of the song that the music is changed just enough to match his more saddened tone. He sounds as if he's speaking or channeling such a mistreated character that his own voice is a bit more somber and compassionate. Then closes with how it's a long ago history, and everything that once was is now long gone in the ancient dust. That the ancient places are now ruins that we can touch but there's nothing there anymore to drive home the point of how tragic it is or was. The singer is definitely sympathetic to the two women he features, seeing Cassandra as a tragic figure and Helen as someone who only wanted her lover and had no interest in being the central figure of that war. Also a tragic figure, of course. But I have to say that the lyric does tend to be a bit clumsy in that Al Stewart could have written something in place of the famous line "The face that launched a thousand ships" as he rhymes that up with words that end more on the hard consonants and breaks the flow just a little, as they end the various lines that go into the famous line about the ships. I honestly don't know why he couldn't have spent a bit more time on the lyrics since the rest of it flows and indeed the stanzas about Cassandra flow far more naturally. The story would not have changed at all if he left that line out completely. It wasn't needed as the line isn't even from any of Homer's writings. It's actually from Christopher Marlowe in a work called Doctor Faustus. Written sometime around 1590. Almost three millennia after the the events of the Trojan War. But Al Stewart is brilliant and I'm not dissing him at all! |
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