| Aldous Harding – The Barrel Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| Such a compelling, poetic song. There's so much here, it's incredible. Not gonna pretend to know what the artist's intent is, just what my best guess is (at least for today). On the most surface level, it's about a moribund relationship ("it's already dead"), one where a lover has the scales fall from her eyes and has an awakening: when the love is gone, and she has one foot out the door (or one hand arching out). The barrel is a metaphor for a confining, suffocating space. The peaches represent newfound sensuality. Love is random and we construct these barrels as false constructs, the invention of one "soul mate", the idea of romantic monogamy, all the things we were led to believe growing up (the braiding). The dove is hope, false hope? Ferret in Latin means "little thief", a name given by its penchant to secret away small things. Perhaps these small things are feelings that don't fit in the idea of what's "acceptable"—and the ferret represents animal instinct; perhaps "showing the ferret to the egg" means to give into her true and honest desires. When she talks about sleeping besides words that are no longer read together, it sounds like the person she fell for (the one she "rushed in to hold down" the page) has changed. She can still sense what she fell in love with ("the song from inside the maze"), but the relationship has created a complication of something which was once pure. In her mind, her lover is a faint and distant echo of someone she used to love. The maze is the painful, emotional distance of not being able to truly connect with someone. That said, this song is remarkably hopeful... in a way it reminds me very much of Fleetwood Mac's "I Don't Wanna Know" ... while tonally different, it's about recognizing the end of a relationship in a way that understands love as a greater force that guides us in ways we can't always understand | |
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.