| Radiohead – True Love Waits Lyrics | 7 years ago |
| EDIT: The end of their relationship only had an influence on A Moon Shaped Pool, while their relationship influenced the earlier work. I do imagine that their relationship ending when it did influenced the decision to close A Moon Shaped Pool with True Love Waits after all this time. | |
| Radiohead – True Love Waits Lyrics | 7 years ago |
| In reading the news today, I ran across an article about Dr. Rachel Owen, who was Thom's partner for 23 years, as well as the mother of his two children. They were together until August 2015. She recently passed away after a battle with cancer, and the article noted that their relationship and its end had a heavy influence on "Creep", "True Love Waits", and all of A Moon Shaped Pool, on which this is the final song. It was the first time it had appeared as a studio track--it had previously been released only as a live version on I Might Be Wrong-- though the song has been played in various versions/arrangements since 1995, and was considered for inclusion on OK Computer, Kid A and Amnesiac. I think it is telling and poignant that Thom only settled on a studio version he could live with during/after the demise of their relationship, and while I hate to speculate that the song is solely about her, particularly since they had such a private relationship, I can't help but feel that is must be. While the song has always struck very poignant chords with me, especially in its final refrains, I found that in listening to it today, its emotional wallop is intensely magnified. After all, for a brief song with limited lyrics, details like "your tiny hands/your crazy-kitten smile" smack of the sort of intimacy and specificity that come from real life, as does the way Thom imbues it with what always sounds like gut-wrenchingly real feeling. R.I.P., Dr. Owen. | |
| Father John Misty – Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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Perhaps it's just me, but I feel that there are some good explanations/interpretations for this song that seem to seamlessly incorporate all the elements of sex, love, death and loss present here. First off, while there are lines that hint at his lover being dead in a real, corporeal way--"It hasn't been long so it seems/since I was picking out an island and tomb for you/at the Hollywood cemetery" being the most obvious--there are also hints that she is still alive, but is the sort of reckless, socially defiant personality that allows the singer to indulge in his own death wish and feed his current ambivalance about living by following her into the destructive storm of her personality. Whichever is the case, he is still committing to being with her, alive or dead, even as he fears her intensity and the way he can't seem to separate himself from her influence. He is unnerved by her manic behavior and disregard for the distinctions between the mores of the living or the death--ie, "What are people gonna think?" and "We should let this dead guy sleep"--but at the same time it exhilarates him. Furthermore, when he sings, "Jesus Christ/I laid up for hours in a daze/retracing the expanse of your American back/with Adderal and weed in my veins", to me he seems to be attempting to articulate that push/pull, love/hate, life/death tug of war within himself, especially since his tone and inflection suggest a mixture of reverence and uneasy self-loathing. In being with her, he's ridden and possibly still is riding the rollercoasters of her emotions and indulges(ed?) her in her craziness both because it's sexually stimulating and because it allows him to stand on the edge and stare down into his own personal oblivion without quite tipping over into it...yet. Whether or not the woman he pines for has passed away in the literal sense or whether he simply knows that at some point he's going to have to make a difficult choice between saving himself at her expense in order to live a less confusing life, or embracing his own death in order to be closer to her now that she's gone, I feel like the essence of the song is the same. It's fitting that the French call orgasms "la petit mort", or "the little death", and it certainly seems to apply here. It's possible he is truly mourning her loss after she has passed on, dealing with his grief by writhing against and jacking off on tombstones in the cemetery where she is buried in spite of the humiliation of people seeing him there so often he can no longer easily explain away his presence. If she's alive, he is simply a troubled man distracting himself with a woman whose problems far outweigh his own. Either way, sex and the physical indulgence of his body are the only things that bring him comfort as he stumbles through his life wondering what, if anything, to do next. Finally, I love that for me, the line "someone's gotta help me dig" can be interpreted to mean any of the following: 1) That he wants to continue to dig the two of them deeper into his/their own dark, twisted hole so that they can be free of the prying looks of people that don't understand them; 2) that he is literally so crazed with grief over losing her that he wants to dig up her body and hopes other people will leave him alone with her corpse and his memories; or 3) he views her as the perfect partner even as she frightens him, because she is the only one willing to dig with him down into the darkest, dirtiest recesses inside him and then soothe and protect him from them with the comfort of her body. So, yeah. I could be way off, but that's what I get out of it so far. It may be about sex in graveyards, death, and/or obsessive love or grief, or it could be that the past and present are so overlapping and intertwining for him that he simply can't tell the difference, and subsequently neither can we. I think that's what makes the song so arresting and worthy of many, many listens. |
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| Laura Marling – Rambling Man Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| I think perhaps, after about a million listens, that this is a song about the ways in which our expectations of what being a woman can often mean--that women are meant to be caretakers, to be nurturers, to sacrifice themselves and their expectations to those of their children and family--may erode a woman's identity if she isn't careful to fight to be recognized as her own entity, separate of what she can offer to others. The protagonist of this song sees how easy it is to be subsumed by others' needs and expectations of what it means to be female, and is determined to break away from them and forge her own sense of power and worth--hence the lines--"And the weak need to be lead/and the tender hearts carried to their beds/and it's a pale and cold affair/And I'll be damned if I'll be found there." Instead, she wants to either follow the example of a rambling man--a creature who by definition has learned to break away from domestic convention and pursue his own fate--and/or to be with one romantically, although if she does decide to commit to someone, she still wants it to "always be known that I was who I am", meaning that she doesn't want him to be able to take the credit for her adventurous spirit any more than she wants to spend her life catering to society's view of what a woman should be. She recognizes that life can batter us all down in different ways, but that those who cannot accept that we're all fated to die, and so must live our lives passionately while we still have them, are doomed to stay vulnerable and in their own heads, too consumed with angst to really live. While she knows that it can be easy to be consumed by doubt, depression and the like--"it's funny how the first chords you come to/are the minor notes that come to serenade you"--she also knows that it is or should be equally difficult to accept a half-fulfilled life--"It's hard to accept yourself as someone you don't desire/As someone you don't want to be." For all these reasons and more, I will always love this song. I'm not sure, but I think that the official video, with it's images of things and people submerging and emerging from water, cryptic boxes, etc...tends to bear out my theories at least a little, I hope. | |
| Kanye West – Runaway Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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You're missing the final verse Kanye sings, at least in the version I have. In it, he sings this verse before the final repeat of the hook: "Never was much of a romantic/I could never take the intimacy/And I know it did damage/'Cause the look in your eyes is killin' me/I guess that you had an advantage/'Cause you could blame me for everything/And I don't know how I'm-a manage/If one day you just up and leave". To me, this may be the most important verse, because it gives us a final, slightly deeper glimpse at the fear and regret behind his ambivalence and inability to fully commit, even to a woman he truly loves--there are simply too many temptations, his old habits are too ingrained, and his partner has made it too easy for him to buy into his own excuses. He doesn't understand why she won't give into his attempts to drive her away--"I'm about to get crazy/why can't she just run away?", even as he admits that it will break him when she finally does give up and leave. That said, I think this song isn't about someone who doesn't love the woman he's with, but about a guy that admits that he doesn't really know how to love anyone, including himself--hence the back and forth between lines that play up his secret pockets of self-loathing and lines that brag about his money and its ability to pull in women. He admits that his woman is a "good girl", but he's still addicted to the "hood rats" even though he knows their attraction to him is almost certainly totally shallow and all about what he could provide for them if they took her place. To me there's a lingering sadness in this song about the loneliness of that fact--he can't really connect, so he drowns himself in money and stray p***y, and feels helpless to change that fact. I absolutely love Kanye, but was shocked that he wrote a song that revealed so much vulnerability; I feel like he's really grown as an artist on this album. |
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| Frightened Rabbit – The Modern Leper Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I agree that this song doesn't necessarily have to be about a drug addict/alcoholic/depressive/all of the above, although it does seem a likely option with the type of personality he's describing. The thing is, whatever he might or might not be addicted to, to me this song is about the fact that he isn't the only addict--they are addicted to each other and the sick cycle that they have together. I love the way the lyrics nail his confusion and contempt for her willingness to swallow his failures over and over again. He needs her to absolve him so he doesn't go completely off the deep end, but the fact that he knows she stays for bad reasons gives him someone to blame other than himself, and gives him a reason to try to cut her free, which the part of him that loves her wants to do even though he knows he needs her. He's angry at himself for screwing up all the time, but feels that he has no alternatives. And even though he is in some ways better off with her because she's the only one who truly cares for him, she does him equal damage because the ways that he hurts her are apparent but inexplicable to him. He hates himself for not being able to figure out a way to stop hurting her, and he half hates her for staying and making him watch what he's doing to her. He doesn't fully understand that she's as addicted as him, because all he can see are his own problems. I don't see any hope at all in the last lines, because he's already said unequivocably that he won't change, so basically he's just begging her to ignore his behavior for one more day, ignore him trying to push her away one more time, because that's what most people in such unhealthy situations do--enable each other to maintain the status quo, no matter how broken it may be. A great song, beautifully written. I listen to it sometimes to remind myself of a few things it can be easy to forget if this song makes a lot of sense to you because you've lived it. |
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| Volcano Choir – Island, IS Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I won't speculate on the meaning (at least not yet), but here's what I heard/think I heard for some of the missing spots: 1) I think it's "Well your heart is a bush and it's talking to --with some size-- or --with some side--. I'm pretty positive it's "with some", but can't quite make out the last word. 2) Instead of "I'll let your heart find", I think the line is "all that your heart finds" 3) I think it might be "the reaper of bonds" 4) It is "tear into the night". 5) Finally, I think it says, "And you solved it, said you called it". Let me know what you think. Hope this helps! I love this song and can't wait for the rest of the album. I'm a HUGE Bon Iver fan. |
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