mewithoutYou is my favorite band and this is probably my favorite mewithoutYou song. In an interview Aaron Weiss explained he was inspired by a great poem by John Donne called 'A Validiction: Forbidding Mourning'
" It's about...It's based on a poem by John Donne called 'A Validiction: Forbidding Mourning', and its about John Donne writing to his wife as he was going away on a trip and was telling his wife as she remained home, I think he was a preacher. And he was travelling around for some reason or another. He was just telling her, you know, that this seperation of ours, you know, the bodily seperation can't seperate our souls and God will be watching over us while we're apart. And especially I suppose for a married couple its different, I mean when the Bible says the two flesh become one, it has perhaps more significance than me writing it to my girlfriend you know, but it is written about my ex-girlfriend Amanda at a time when I wasn't just going away on a trip. We split up but I thought it was appropriate nonetheless that, I mean theres a line, my favourite image, I mean I quote it in the lyrics, it's taken straight from the poem, the line is like, 'thy firmness makes my circle just, and makes me end where I begun'. It's a metaphor of a compass, you know, used to draw circles, that sort of a compass. He compares himself to like the pencil point that circles around, and his wife as the fixed, like the fixed metal point of it. And so as he travels around, like, she stays put but kinda leans out after him as he travels around as a compass would, and its just such a moving image to me, and of course, he's an amazing poet. So I just stole the idea straight from that, and I just changed the words and added my own, and just made it, I guess, appropriate to what I was going through, but boy oh boy thats my favourite song too. And then the music, I mean the bass and the guitar work and everything..."-Aaron Weiss |
