| U2 – Get On Your Boots Lyrics | 14 years ago |
|
I think this song is an ode to women in the military - a relatively new phenomenon from a historical perspective. Get on your boots - military boots. It's praising the bravery and heroism of female soldiers. Go back, read the lyrics from that perspective. Great song. |
|
| Men Without Hats – O Sole Mio Lyrics | 15 years ago |
|
It's about isoloation (O sole mio = "only me"), and trying to make a connection with another human being. And being frustrated with unsuccessful attempts to connect with someone, and wondering if you will ever be able to truly connect with someone, or if it will forever be "only me". O sole mio. |
|
| U2 – If God Will Send His Angels Lyrics | 15 years ago |
|
It's scary when God asks you to be one of his angels, and you don't know what to do. I need to be an angel, but I'm scared. I will trust. I will follow. |
|
| Bruce Springsteen – County Fair Lyrics | 15 years ago |
|
Here's a great review that I think captures the essence of this song: Fair Whether Springsteen's darkly light 'County Fair,' a should-be summer classic By Karl Byrn Are we having fun yet? Isn't that what we expect from the currently running Sonoma County Fair--a chance to simply enjoy? Our times are filled with uncertainty, uneasiness about our leaders, the economy and an irresolute war, so we need the guarantee of thrill that the fair offers. The fair unites our expectations in a community experience, but there's a little bit of a let-down built into every anticipation; the fair moves on and we have to go back to routine. There's an obscure Bruce Springsteen song about this, a real gem titled simply "County Fair." This detailed portrait of a small-town, end-of-summer fair, taken from sessions Springsteen recorded in 1983 after his fabled Nebraska album, was a bootleg favorite for years before surfacing officially on the Columbia Records' Essential series. "County Fair" is tucked away on the third disc of The Essential Bruce Springsteen, which follows two straightforward best-of discs with an often roaring, often somber set of the Hall-of-Famer's rockabilly, soundtrack and B-side miscellanea. "County Fair" plays as whimsical, relaxed folk rock, sentimental and childlike. There's a palpable sense of shared desire in the opening lines: "Every year when summer comes around / They stretch a banner 'cross the main street in town / And you feel something happen in the air." From there, Springsteen lays on the good stuff: the roller coaster, "the pipe organ on the merry-go-round," winning stuffed animals on the midway--even laughing at himself while searching for his car in the parking lot. What's striking about "County Fair" is that it isn't about all that. The artist is looking for something deeper. And what he finds is something that's closer to our common expectations and enjoyment, a whole cycle of hope and dissatisfaction. The song is really a desperate prayer for eternal life. He names the act at the open-air bandstand "James Young and the Immortal Ones," places the site of the fair at "Soldier's Field," and tries to "steal a kiss in the dark" (not get or give, but steal). By the final line, Springsteen doesn't hide the prayer: "I lean back and stare up at the stars / Oh, I wish I'd never have to let this moment go." The final blow is a simple musical trick. "County Fair" is written in a standard, easy-going, roots-rock chord progression that goes G-C-D, with an E minor tossed in for pensive effect. It's the four-chord template of the Drifters' "There Goes My Baby" and the Marvellettes' "Please Mr. Postman," a pattern varied slightly on other classics like Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl" and Bob Seger's "Night Moves." Usually, the E minor comes in the verse or chorus. But here, Bruce omits it until after the final line, strumming it suddenly and purposefully into a ghostly rumble, an unresolved tag that dramatically shifts the mood of "County Fair" from fond community celebration to bitter dread. Though recorded 20 years ago in the Reagan era, this song still tells us about our present. Why does fun seem like an illusion? Why are we haunted by irresolution? Is joy merely slippery and temporary? Perhaps there's just too much in our imbalanced world that's too hard to take. The county fair is an archetypal tradition, a symbol with a huge comfort factor, an annual chance to put uncertainty aside. But as our world gets more extreme, we may expect too much of our fair experience, so much that its thrill becomes an exaggerated promise with the painful price of having to reluctantly let it go. "County Fair" is an example of how powerful rock music historically plants itself on a tightrope between redemption and disaster. It stares uncomfortable reality straight in the eye, asserting joy while acknowledging imperfection. This song may belong in rock's amusement-park tradition of songs like Freddy "Boom Boom" Cannon's "Palisades Park" or the Drifters' "Under the Boardwalk" or with the fun-in-the-summer theme of any number of Beach Boys classics, but "County Fair" is a closer kin to the current rock mode of confessional doubt. Rock may have stopped being a music and culture of fun. Hip-hop and country hits still try to party, but the important rock acts of our day--Radiohead, Metallica, Jack White, Dave Grohl--sing more about mysteries than anything close to simple enjoyment. Rock songs celebrating fun are a rarity. But Springsteen's should-be summertime classic does both jobs, touching a nerve of incompleteness, but with the fond reminder that the teddy bears and rides may be the bottom line after all. |
|
| Bruce Springsteen – Girls In Their Summer Clothes Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| It's about acceptance of time passing and growing older. | |
| Genesis – Home By The Sea Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| I always thought it was written from the perspective of an elderly person in a convalescent home (the "home by the sea"), talking to someone who has come to visit them. They are asking the person visiting them to "let us relive their lives, in what we tell you". It's about the value of listening to elderly people and valuing them as people and valuing their experience. | |
| Van Halen – Love Walks In Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| Substitute the word "God" for "love" and it's pretty clear what this song is about. | |
| U2 – A Day Without Me Lyrics | 17 years ago |
|
I don't think of this song as a suicide song at all. To me it's about transcending yourself. It's about overcoming ego. The "landslide in my ego", to me anyway, signifies a crumbling of the value we put on ourselves, the self-absorbancy that our society promotes and most of us fall victim to. It's about getting out of yourself, then focusing on God's will and serving others. And looking back at yourself and both laughing and crying at the world you left behind. The world of "self". Crying because you wasted so much time worrying about yourself and laughing because you realize how silly it all was. Then moving on without the "me", without the constant focus on "self". Every once in a while, I experience "A Day Without Me", a day when God just seems to carry me and the next right thing to do just seems so natural. A day when I don't get all caught up with my own petty concerns and others take priority. To me, that's what this song is about. That's what this song means to me. |
|
| U2 – Bad Lyrics | 17 years ago |
|
I love what people have written here about this song being about something (anything) that you know you have to let go of, but you just can't. I viewed it from the standpoint of addiction - that it was a substance that you can't let go of. But reading others' viewpoints here is great. That's what makes music - and U2's lyrics in particular - great in my opinion. They are personal to everyone. I look at this song now and it means something different to me than it used to. I look at it now in the context of the songe that have come after it. To me, Bad and Walk On are like perfect bookends. "Bad" is "all that you can't leave behind". Bad is the inability to leave "it" behind (whatever "it" may be to you) and Walk On is the decision to finally move forward and leave it behind. Because you have to leave it behind. |
|
| The Beatles – Here Comes the Sun Lyrics | 18 years ago |
|
I can't stop listening to this song lately. I am going through a huge spiritual awakening. After years of addiction, self will and turning my back on God, I have finally let him into my life. And He is working miracles. This song captures it all for me. After that long, cold, dark spiritual winter - the sun (Son?) is finally peeking through. I feel that ice is slowly melting. It feels like years since it's been here. The warmth, the hope, the optimism - all returning like Spring after a cold winter. After all the years of worry, anxiety, self-will, resentment, anger, fear - I have turned my life over to God. And - like George Harrison said - I finally feel like "it's allright". |
|
| U2 – Mysterious Ways Lyrics | 18 years ago |
|
Substitute "He" for "She" in this song and it becomes clear what it is about (at least to me). God works (or "moves") in mysterious ways. God is genderless, but is usually referred to as being male. All Bono did was refer to God in the female sense. If you want to kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel. |
|
| Marillion – Warm Wet Circles Lyrics | 18 years ago |
|
The imagery in this song is wonderful. The different connotations of the "warm, wet circle". From the innocence and comfort of a mother's kiss - to a bullet hole. I also think he's referring to a woman's sexual organ in this song - as in a young girl desperately giving it away (her virginity, perhaps) before it's too late. Ad, of course, the reference to the warm wet circles left on the bar by drinks. Brilliant lyrics. |
|
| U2 – Bad Lyrics | 18 years ago |
|
Still my favorite U2 song. I think it was written about his friend who died of a heroin overdose, but to me it just speaks to addiction in general. As one recovering from addiction, I can relate so much to the feelings expressed in this song. The desperation, dislocation, seperation, condemnation, revelation, temptation, isolation and finally complete desolation. The awareness and understanding of the physical, emotional, and spiritual damage that you're doing to yourself - "I'm wide awake, I'm not sleeping". But at the same time, the complete inability to stop doing it - "If I could, you know I would...let it go". Powerful lyrics, |
|
| U2 – Yahweh Lyrics | 18 years ago |
|
Matthew 5:14 says: "You (referring to Jesus' followers) are the light of the world--like a city on a mountain, glowing in the night for all to see." So when Bono writes: Take this city A city should be shining on a hill Take this city If it be your will What no man can own, no man can take... I hear it as - God, if it is your will take everything from me, including my physical life. Others can take my belongings, my freedom, my ideas, even my physical being. But no man can own my soul, therefore no man can take my soul. And that's really all that matters. |
|
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.