| Neil Diamond – Play Me Lyrics | 1 year ago |
| I don't believe this song is about his girlfriend, nor his guitar. I interpret the other "person" in this song is his creative muse. I say this because as a singer/songwriter myself, I know that inspiration frequently flies in unexpectedly from nowhere, to include waking up in the morning and having a melody fragment or a partial lyric or a song title flitting through my mind, with no idea where it came from. I think that's what Diamond is referring to when he sings "I one day woke up to find her lying beside my bed." He shortly sings "come take me," which to me means "enter me, possess me, join me... I want you inside of me to partner with me to develop this idea (whatever it is) into something fuller." Their man-plus-muse collaboration capitalizes on some beneficial opposites, expressed as "she was morning and I was nighttime" and "you are the sun, I am the moon" and "you are the words, I am the tune." Only when these opposites are allowed to comingle does he finally sing, "Play me." Thinking of the song in this context makes even more sense when he sings "song she sang to me, song she brang to me, words that rang in me, rhyme that sprang from me." Here his muse is showering him with creative contributions, which altogether "warmed the night," meaning he and his muse worked the creative process together and produced something wonderful. The final verse, I think, depicts him moving on toward the creation of something new, some other song. He begins to travel (i.e., moving on) along a road that is "thorned and narrow," which to me means he naturally encounters another bout of needing to create again...to write another song. And that's hard work (i.e., thorned and narrow), which he knows quite well. But he also knows that it's going to take another encounter with his muse to get to "another place" where "another grace would save me." I think this explanation of the song makes the most sense. After all, Neil Diamond sometimes gets rather meta, writing songs about songs. Off the top of my head I can think of four -- "Beautiful Noise," "Song Sung Blue," "The Singer Sings His Song," and "Yesterday's Songs." | |
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