| Blue Öyster Cult – Burnin' For You Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[Major:29512] Valor Yes, like many of their songs, this one is a composite of multiple trains of thought. I cannot think of another band who would do this as often or with the complexity of BOC. | |
| Blue Öyster Cult – Burnin' For You Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[mongoosestalker:29511] Until the actual lyrics were clarified, I'd rationalized that "freezing their eyes" was being the rock star, playing the ultimate "cool school" role for the world. There would be a connection again to some of the lyrics in "7 Screaming Diz-Busters" who had "ice behind their eyes", and where there is also another making reference to a Faustian deal. But I'm glad that after all these many years it is clarified that the words were "suns that were freezing and lives that were through". I caught the misinterpretation of "signs of what freezing their eyes would prove" nearly 20 years ago and it seemed off. How could we all hear a song SO MANY times for so many decades and still never get the lyrics? LOL | |
| Blue Öyster Cult – Burnin' For You Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[killwhitey42:29510] (heh, like your nym - the answer to life, the universe and everything is...oh brother! LOL) I think you're right that within the double-meanings of this song, there is the "due" he's paying by obligation and he's "burning" (perhaps eternally) for his audience, but then there's the burning of longing to be *home* with someone he would rather be with, doing what he would rather be doing. There are several trains of thought swirled together in this song, and that is certainly the most subtle, "between the lines" meanings implied. It is pure genius to be able to write an apparently simple song and to load it with such complexity as these guys have made a subtle secondary art of doing. | |
| Blue Öyster Cult – Burnin' For You Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[shouse043:29509] Where did someone say *this song* was about suicide? Jeez, people will just think (and write) any damn thing! Our species is a strange and wondrous creature! LOL | |
| Blue Öyster Cult – Burnin' For You Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[BloodReign:29508] Yes, still to this very day, Eric and Buck continue. Just saw an ad for BOC playing locally last night. Touring has always been the top source of income for recording artists, with second being merchandise (unless you're a band like KIss, then THAT is first, at least for the trademark owner(s) within the band) with record sales being at the low end of their income percentage, especially today. | |
| Blue Öyster Cult – Burnin' For You Lyrics | 6 years ago |
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@[Unknown:29506] Soldier what you describe would be the unspoken trade-off of the pact this song is about and the "between the lines" sub-narrative. A big trade off "living for giving the devil his due" and the home he will never have, which includes the regular things everyone needs. Anyone who has traveled for their career knows what this feels like, but turn it up many notches of intensity with the trappings of being a touring rock star. It's not really fun or glamorous, especially once reaching your 30s, which Buck would have been by the time he wrote this. The stories we have heard of with Led Zeppelin and The Who were the stories of very young men who were otherwise BORED and entertaining themselves. That special, sweet regular girl who makes a house a home is never going to wait around for THAT, and often not even for a tame and mature touring musician. She has her needs, too. [@[everyone:29507]: sorry for the duplicate comment here] The normal life, that love of that regular "girl next door" who could never bear the continuous journeying of this hellbound Path, the abandonment of something more beautiful and genuine than anything that will ever be discovered on the Great Adventure ensuing from this Faustian agreement that in the end will leave the author burning for eternity. |
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| Blue Öyster Cult – Burnin' For You Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[RedKing:29505] As printed, I believe you are right. However, it could also mean time to play *besides*, as in devil's advocate (playing with the "devil" theme here). But that would be implied, an extension of what is the beauty of BOC's writing style - they intentionally load their lyrics with entendre, ambiguity, swirls of multiple trains of thought (this one has at least two ideas swirled together) leaving doors wide open to interpretation and imagination. | |
| Blue Öyster Cult – Burnin' For You Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[xshufflemuffin:29504] that would be the unspoken trade-off of the pact this song is about. The normal life, that love of that regular "girl next door" who could never bear the continuous journeying of this hellbound Path, the abandonment of something more beautiful and genuine than anything that will ever be discovered on the Great Adventure ensuing from this Faustian agreement that in the end will leave the author burning for eternity | |
| Blue Öyster Cult – Burnin' For You Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[romefalls:29503] yes, Randy91 nails it for this song (and I left comment there) but as for DFTR, the Stand came out two years afterwards and made reference to the song, not the other way around. It may not be Robert Johnson he is making reference to, but instead doing the same as what Robert Johnson became famous for, even more than his musical legacy. Where DFTR is clearly about the subject of suicide, this one is clearly about a Faustian pact, but then swirled together with a second train of thought regarding the author's own life being parallel Keruac's "On the Road" with the continuous touring that is required as a result of the pact | |
| Blue Öyster Cult – Burnin' For You Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[ChaosFluro24:29502] What girl? He sold his soul to serve *us* rock and roll. The *you* he is burning for is his audience and because of his constant touring, "home [he'll] never be" | |
| Blue Öyster Cult – Don't Fear The Reaper Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[kennethQ77:29495] Eric Clapton didn't write Cocaine. If you were KennethQ74, you would have known who wrote it for being from the same town..and you might have known that the song wasn't glorifying cocaine use either. "She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie." And yeah, don't record songs dufus, SUPPORT THE ARTISTS AND BUY THEM. | |
| Blue Öyster Cult – Burnin' For You Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| I think you're onto something here. Buck is applying his life parallel to this Kerouac book. Like a lot of BOC songs, there are swirled trains of thought that are distinct and separate and here would be an example of that. His life of being a touring musician with pressures from the record company AND another thing that is hinted toward in "7 Screaming Diz-Busters", which is yet another song with two or three distinctly different trains of thought swirled together. | |
| Blue Öyster Cult – Burnin' For You Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[OS:29494] Was Here Thank you for this clarification. I'd read about 20 years ago someone interpreting it as "I'd seen signs of what freezing their eyes would prove" and though I never was able to make out what they were saying since it was first played on the radio and many years playing the album and the song many times, this never fit. What they printed here was even further. Thank for clarifying this now after mishearing (or being unable to hear) the words for what has been now 38 years. | |
| Blue Öyster Cult – Don't Fear The Reaper Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[cja0127:29493] Dong fear the Reaper | |
| Blue Öyster Cult – Don't Fear The Reaper Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| For 6 million to have died at the hands of the Nazis during WWII, 40,000 people would have had to been executed daily, a mathematical figure that leads the skepticism of many holocaust deniers, who cite as an impossibility even with all the combined facilities Germany had at their disposal. There have been slight references to Hitler and WWII in early BOC songs ("ME 262" and "Wings Wetted Down" are a couple of examples) and BOC songs can often be multiple trains of thought swirled together. It was around the time that Agents of Fortune was released that the word "holocaust" was assigned to the overall incident, as well as the 6 million number, which had been far lower in the beginning. | |
| Leonard Cohen – Waiting For The Miracle Lyrics | 7 years ago |
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What's in a name? Some of you already know that a "cohen" or "kohen" is a priest. For instance, a Cohen Gadol ("high priest") would have been the only man authorized to enter the Holy of Holies. Leonard Cohen exuded just as much of his spirituality in his songs as he did his many loves, carnal desires, and frustrations, often all poetically intertwined, woven together between the verses and themes. There is indeed a hint of religious ambiguity to the "miracle" and many of those commenting here were pretty close. Waiting for the "miracle" is indeed human love but also implies waiting for The Messiah, which most Jewish people do not recognize as being the man we all refer to as Christ. It even appears in our world today that the reckless abandon of our military and industry destroying the planet is to defiantly dare The Messiah to finally come and save us all, as promised. In many of Cohen's songs, he hinted symbolically to a struggle with the Christian definition of the Messiah in numerous songs, including "Suzanne" and "So Long Maryanne". This would be not only his personal expression of that struggle but that of Jewish people living within Christian nations. The entirety of "You Want It Darker", the first track on his final album, *really* punctuates this struggle, being written and recorded in the final moments of his life. But back to this particular song, again he was also always struggling with love and the urges we all humanly have. He was also very much a Jewish man, even if a Jewish Buddhist (a "JuBu"), and he frames many of his songs from the Jewish perspective. One verse to punctuate this was: "I haven't been this happy / Since the end of World War II", which was the end of the worst of persecutions of the Jewish people, as we all know, which directly led to re-establishing the nation of Israel, which many tend to forget. Another: "When you've fallen on the highway / And you're lying in the rain / And they ask you how you're doing / Of course you'll say you can't complain" It is Jewish tradition to respond with "can't complain", whether better or worse, so as to avoid jinxing anything that is going well or to graciously understate something that isn't, which, in the case of this verse was more the latter. Clearly the lady subject of his song was also Jewish. Lots of great insights throughout this thread. The story of the "three airplanes" I had always heard as a helicopter, a boat, and some other rescue vehicle, but we all know planes cannot land or slow down enough to rescue someone stranded in a flooded area. LOL |
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