| Peter Gabriel – Humdrum Lyrics | 3 years ago |
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This song to me is about a man having to say goodbye to a woman he is in love with and how this departure makes him both saddened and overrun with thoughts. ..And I’ll go as far as to argue that the woman is German (last line Liebe schoen). She departs from JFK airport, and he is so in love he is nearly willing to beg for her to stay. (“Hey Valentina, you want me to beg?”). His mind is wrapped in thought on how this event of her leaving (“you got me cooking, I’m a hardboiled egg”). “Listen to my heart, don’t need no stethoscope” reinforces the message of how much in love he is. His heart is beating loudly for her. His thoughts filled with the fact she is leaving, his only recourse is to empty his mind. The bridge is more word play revolving around a theme of man and woman, their equality, the fact that each feeds the other, and an additional theme of from darkness to light. He draws on reversals of popular mythos (woman came from man’s rib in the Bible, Peter reverses it, “out of woman come the man”). There is another reversal within more Thelemic thoughts of As Above, So Below, (a reference to a layered structure of the universe) with his lyric “as below, so above” (which, if you think about it, is just as true btw). These plays on common mythos and usages of themes aside, I interpret this section as a gift of words to the woman who left. It is a poem for one wrapped in a wonderful orchestral treatment. |
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