| Grandaddy – L.F.O. Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| After pushing the "add comment" button, I realized I kinda contradicted myself there with having two best ways to listen to the song. Either way is great. Or you can break the law and drive late at night on a lonely country road with your headphones on and cranked up to get the super ultimate effect. | |
| Grandaddy – L.F.O. Lyrics | 17 years ago |
|
I'm guessing it goes "We'll try again" instead of "Will try again." But it really doesn't make that much of a difference, does it? This little B-side is actually my favorite Grandaddy song. Sure, the lyrics don't reach a level of The Warming Sun. Maybe it took Jason 30 seconds to write them, but there's still those frequent Grandaddy themes of yearning and escapism and feeling out of place. And as the above poster mentioned, it walks this fine line between being gorgeous and being creepy. I had headphones on the first time I listened to it, and I think that's the best way to appreciate it. Pump up the volume and wait for the bass synth to kick in. Then you get the layers of synth and the warbly piano flourishes, and you're not quite sure whether to feel sad or a little creeped out. Either way, it's the one Grandaddy song that got stuck in my head the most. For best effect, listen to it late at night on a lonely country road. I never saw or heard Jason or anyone in the band discuss this song, so I have no idea if L.F.O. is supposed to stand for low-frequency oscillation or not. But if you were to wager a guess, I'm thinking that would be a pretty good guess. |
|
| Built to Spill – The Host Lyrics | 17 years ago |
|
Thanks to archive.org's Wayback Machine, I was able to find Doug's quotes about the song: "Lyrics don't really mean much to me, so, you know, they don't really come from anywhere in particular. Lyrics for me are probably 90% just filler, just words for me to sing. When I write a song, first I'll write a melody and I'll have no lyrics for it and sometimes just the random thing that I sing when I'm making up the melody gets stuck and that becomes lyrics. With one of our new songs, "The Host," it had a lot to do with certain vowel sounds and making a lot of rhymes with the "I" sound in them. And the lyrics don't really mean much at all. So it's more to me how it comes across sounding than what it comes across meaning. Basically it's about finding something to fit the meter of the music." OK, so the lyrics "don't mean much at all" instead of being completely meaningless. But not too much energy should be spent analyzing them. The only analysis I've seen of them is an article discussing the plight of indie rock after its heyday in the 90's, and the author believing the lyrics "Something is wrong, Something invisible is gone" were written to convey that that era is over and that Doug is mourning the loss of it. Many people are confused by or don't like the placement of this song as Track 2 on the album, but I was quite happy it was given a prominent position. |
|
| Built to Spill – The Host Lyrics | 17 years ago |
|
Not ridiculous to me given it's one of their songs that no one ever talks about and never gets played live. I couldn't get this song out of my head in the summer of 2003, and I'd rack my brain trying to decipher what the hell Doug is talking about exactly. Then I was led to a long article about the making of Ancient Melodies of the Future for the Experience Music Project in Seattle. Doug talks about this song and literally said the song is "meaningless" (this was my introduction to this common trait of a lot of Doug's lyrics). The sounds of the words used are the driving force of the song, and there's no real meaning behind them. I felt kind of cheated when I found this out, but live moves on and it's still one of my very favorites by the band, even though I'm assuredly in the minority here. Unfortunately the article no longer exists online. |
|
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.