| Tori Amos – Caught A Lite Sneeze Lyrics | 1 year ago |
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This is one of my favorite Tori Amos songs and it illustrates perfectly what I love most about her: her ability to use adequate amounts of both raw, primal emotion and indecipherably private , complex, dream-like, free-style imagery and references and still the music has a focal point. A relationship disappointed her. It was so easy for it all to fall apart. The turbulence is all in the music, the juxtapositions. The level of anger is in the odd stand-alone, flyaway private references like … Honestly, unless she can/wants to reveal every detail in an interview what or who she means, it remains cozily private and private, personal, closed. But nevertheless, this song is so powerful … I remember being 14 one night, waking up, feeling a need to listen to it, putting on my disc man and earplugs and crying about something (and/or someone) … And I remember thinking: “Why ?” Her songs don’t always have to make perfect sense — they can feel deeply personal to the listener even if it’s like glimpsing into another’s dreams. They can merge with my own disillusionment so easily. Some Tori Amos songs are easy to dissect. This one isn’t. This one gives you just enough to be able to relate to, enough imagery, and the rest is just up to your own sensibility. But : sadness, disappointment, anger, resentment, digs, pain and frustration, feelings of inadequacy… all are here. The “Sister Ernestine” or “Mr. St John “ are things only she can tell you for sure. The religious feel of those names, are also part of many other songs of hers, so they don’t really reveal all that much . The curious “ big loan from the girls’ zone” also suggests something but …. Don’t overthink it. Often songwriters don’t reveal fully because it would lose the power, and they would have to talk too much about their inner world. Often songwriters don’t reveal every last detail fully because the art would lose some of the power, it would be intrusive to their own unique inner world, and … in some cases even they lost the exact meaning overtime or they forgot it or it changed even for them. These lyrics are so stream-of-consciousness and disjointed in their imagery that they feel “channeled” or “in trance “ and though no doubt the words meant something to her when written, the meaning is not easy to access and remains kind of like a part of her mind/ creativity. And yet… it works perfectly with the music to create such an experience of a destroyed bond, disappointment and other emotions I listed above. It’s hard to deny that they are present, but they work in perfect synchrony with the music. |
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| The Lover Speaks – No more I love yous Lyrics | 1 year ago |
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The person loved someone beyond what they could comprehend, unto madness (“lunatic from your precious face”). They truly suffered and found their beloved everywhere (even in “buttonhole tunes” to try to soothe their “aching heart,” the pain of not having the perfect union or any union at all to their beloved). They were haunted by this love for a significantly long time. They were so tortured they’d be sacrificing sleep, ease, and energy just unable to exit this state of longing. Intensely, they lost themselves in love and the unfulfilled desire for their person. It’d be overpowering and endless, they’d go into despair— crying all night, maybe. Feeling like no thing mattered, wouldn’t really live since they’d be swallowed by the strongest illusions: “so many monsters.” By that he means, the way the mind fixates on another. The strong emotions associated with deep but unrequited love. The labyrinths of pain , of anguish, of memory, of suppositions, of false hope, of attachment towards something that yields no reality but totally mired his being in a long torment he stayed in because of the accompanying pull of love (and/or limerence). And now (“But now”) finally he’s been reborn, he has been exiled by “the language” of love. He is now experiencing the freedom of detachment and composure. This illusion has finally lost its hold. Just as he was intense in loving pointlessly, he is intense in the disappearance of feeling, eloquently expressed. I don’t feel it’s pretentious. He probably had 50,000 songs and poems to pay ode to an indifferent lover at 3am circling endlessly in one of these 1) unrequited love that was never returned or 2) a former lover who lost interest or 3) something similar. So he says that very language which trapped him in the web or labyrinth of thought and rumination is fading by itself now. He finds himself peaceful exiled from a feeling so intense he never thought he could be free and now has another perspective, one of change. Time passed. He finally triumphed over very stormy feelings, it’s so different from what he once felt that he can’t really understand it. Compare the mechanical analysis of how he feels now “changes are shifting outside the words” to the poetics of the past “I used to be woebegone, … And so, restless nights.” At the core, the slight perhaps almost tráceles bitterness means he never truly got completely over the person. Very introspective about the entire ordeal. He finds the new freedom still hard to believe …. But though he would have tried to cling onto the love, he is gradually losing the ability to. It’s the “language “ —aka the entire way of existing— that took the love away from him. It’s still a process in progress. He isn’t fully exiled yet. Life and thought passed. It closed its own door. He didn’t set out to get over the person he once’s loved so madly. Life had to do it for him. He is noticing how it happens in present time. “Language is leaving me exiled.” And “Changes are shifting,” right now and every day. The “I love yous” were probably endless at the beginning, even if he never said the words— words are creation and his entire world was that love and its hopelessness and other sources of anguish. Now “I love yous” he is unable to say that , the intensity and constancy do not overflow. He has found stillness and is perhaps resigned and maybe a bit indifferent, but he still writes this… to celebrate it but also to understand it, because he was so used to his old feeling. And I conclude the latter part from the ups and downs in the music. It’s up to the listener to understand whether he truly is 100% over them or what. I think in the end life passed over him, and he was fortunate to find more neutrality towards such an experience of intense, unbearable love. |
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