| Julian Cope – Safesurfer Lyrics | 1 month ago |
|
Roughly speaking? I just came inside you. In an era of AIDS. Ah, but don't worry, I always wear a condom. With every other partner. Promise. |
|
| Julian Cope – Safesurfer Lyrics | 1 month ago |
|
Roughly speaking? I just came inside you. In an era of AIDS. Ah, but don't worry, I always wear a condom. With every other partner. Promise. |
|
| Beach House – Zebra Lyrics | 1 year ago |
| @[shanalee88:50450] "born into a man" is a lyrical hint it's not a zebra | |
| Beach House – Levitation Lyrics | 3 years ago |
|
@[emma107334:44194] I didn't know them but get ready to be shook..On the BH subreddit, word came out that the song is actually about their accident and death. https://www.reddit.com/r/BeachHouse/comments/wohvl6/the_real_meaning_behind_levitation_rip_liz_and/ This revelation is stunning and changes the song deeply. I thought the song was just great before. Now it hits me at the core. |
|
| Beach House – Levitation Lyrics | 3 years ago |
|
Two 19 year old girls walk by the railroad tracks late at night in Endicott City. They sit on the city bridge where the tracks corss the road into town, with their feet hanging out, their backs to the tracks. One takes a picture of their legs with bare feet hanging over the road. They tweet the picture out. "Levitating." they write. The train arrives in the distance. It's a slow moving freight, carrying coal. The Conductor sees the girls as he passes. But then something goes wrong. The big train hits a patch of bad rail. There's a loud sound. The coal cars start to tip. It's just at the wrong place. The girls are directly hit and crushed by the coal and cars. This is their story, as told by Beach House. During the last three minutes of the song, the droning synths which have been there all along, become louder and louder until they overwhelm... the vocals go into reverb and become more and more distant... And in the last minute the choral synths have finally taken over as the rhythm becomes fainter and fainter... It is a musical metaphor for their death, the unknown surrounding them. There is no right time to die. |
|
| Beach House – Lazuli Lyrics | 7 years ago |
|
This song is about loss. It's the loss of something very meaningful. The song hints that it's a relationship, but it doesn't have to be; bring your own meaning! Musically, the song spends the first section building a tremendously beautiful, majestic theme - the "Enya" knob is turned up to 11. "Make us suffer, like no other" is an amazing lyric in the midst of all this beauty. Beauty can make us suffer -- by showing us that we are inadequate in comparison. Beauty makes us aware of our own potential and ways in which we don't meet it. But having established all this beauty, what becomes of it? In the middle section, it breaks down. It doesn't break down immediately, like a record scratch; it slowly becomes more ominous. Soon the guitar takes over and the song has become something different. it moves at the same pace, but something has changed. No longer major chords, the chords here are all minor and incomplete. "Like no other, you can't be replaced" At this point the loss is complete, and we are in mourning. When "There's nothing like lapis lazuli" is sung at the height of the beautiful section, it is a statement of majesty. But when it is added -- with the same melody! -- to this section, it is now a statement of loss. Beauty has made us suffer, again. This song is about loss. |
|
| Mild High Club – Homage Lyrics | 7 years ago |
| The notes of the verses go 4736251... and are a pattern covered in music theory as the circle of fifths. It's a specific pattern in music that goes back centuries. Bach used it a lot. But to write using it is not stealing, it's borrowing. It's an homage. Especially if you admit it, up front, and don't take it all that seriously. The song turns back upon itself that way, just like the circle of fifths does. | |
| The Clientele – (I Can't Seem To) Make You Mine Lyrics | 8 years ago |
| It's a gargoyle, something beastly at least. But, "I can't seem to make you mine" -- why pick those words, as what the beast would think? How would a gargoyle consider love, and how would that gargoyle bring about someone's love? They would have to transform them into stone, or at least something unmoving, permanent. "I can't make you" = you are what you are, and cannot be transformed into what I am. At this point, go one level deeper and the gargoyle isn't a statue at all. It's a person, a human being, who is rooted not in a permanent garden, but in their personality, or in their place, or in their condition. And they long for someone else who can't be transformed. The analogy remains. That's poetry. | |
| Hooverphonic – Club Montepulciano Lyrics | 8 years ago |
|
"Lenny Beige" is a stage name of British comedian/actor Steve Furst. "Fiona" is probably Fiona Apple; the band toured with Fiona Apple prior to the recording of this album. |
|
| The Besnard Lakes – And You Lied To Me Lyrics | 8 years ago |
| They playfully mix up espionage and relationships metaphorically. "And you lied to me... you aren't even who you said you are" is certainly something that would be said to a spy OR a lover. This idea was maybe first introduced with the 1954 Anais Nin novel "Spy in the House of Love" -- which interestingly has been broadly used as a metaphor in music along the decades. "Spy in the House of Love" is such an appealing metaphor that it's become the title of different songs by many artists - Steve Winwood, Was (Not Was), the dBs, Animal Logic. | |
| Belle & Sebastian – It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career Lyrics | 9 years ago |
|
"Stroke" as in medical stroke... "Stroke" as in "stroke of genius"... "Stroke" as in, what is another word for "painted line"!! It's Murdoch, two meanings is not enough They painted and sold very ordinary art as if it was extraordinary; or, perhaps she painted and he marketed and sold; the final condition is their... i dunno, comeuppance? I dunno. Maybe not comeuppance. Maybe fate. I have to listen to it about fifty more times to fully understand. He has had a medical stroke and in his final moments, in infirm condition, he is left with nothing but her. "wears the clothes of an emperor" Right, "emperor's new clothes"... |
|
| Belle & Sebastian – Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John Lyrics | 9 years ago |
|
Not just about the prolonging of a one night stand... it's far more heartbreaking than that. She has invented her lover completely. She imagines the two of them out; she imagines she has gone home with him and coyly seduced him by asking about the contents of his bedroom. But he's entirely just another dream, and having imagined the encounter, she imagines how it might end: he's shocked at her ugliness. Which is kind of devastating, given it's HER dream. And devastating that this sort of dream has happened over and over, to the point where she's given her dreams nicknames and personalities. That's her life. What a waste. What a song. Excuse my while I go off and have a tear. |
|
| Tracey Thorn – Oh, The Divorces! Lyrics | 9 years ago |
|
The "Jens" she references is songwriter Jens Lekman. After Tracey released this song, Jens wrote the song "Become Someone Else's" which contains a reply: (Become someone) Else than this hopeless young fool What Tracey sang about me is true It all depends what lens you're looking through, maybe But all I know about love, I learned from you, Tracey |
|
| Jens Lekman – Become Someone Else's Lyrics | 9 years ago |
|
The "Tracey" he references is Tracey Thorn. Her 2010 album "Love and Its Opposite" opens with the song "Oh, The Divorces" in which she sings: Oh Jens, oh Jens Your songs seem to look through a different lens You're still so young Love ends just as easy as it's begun Now there's kids to tend The legal biz And custody And oh, the divorces! So these lines are partly his answer back to her. |
|
| Belle & Sebastian – Piazza, New York Catcher Lyrics | 9 years ago |
|
Not so much a red herring, as a way to give the song context. Their relationship blossomed over baseball and the location of the statue, and after consideration and family and life's events, they return to it. On one hand, the pitcher's worrisome detail is just resetting the song for the next act, but it's also a metaphor for how their relationship goes, the differences between them. One the workday catcher, the pitcher consumed with worry. Aside from the gay code of pitcher-catcher, which is an American cultural thing too subtle for Scottish writers, there is a special baseball relationship between the pitcher and catcher. And the verse sort of reminds us that there is a passage of time going on. It's not until winter, a non-baseball season, that the resolution is at hand... back at the statue. |
|
| Air – Mike Mills Lyrics | 10 years ago |
|
The song has three sections. The 4/4 first section has a very plain synth sound play the wandering "theme" of 16th notes. This is pleasant enough, but it's rudely interrupted by a piano, also playing 16th notes but over a 9/8 time in an insistent, repeating pattern. The listener struggles to resolve what has happened, partly because some percussive sounds haven't changed since the opening, echoing the 4/4 section. The song "recovers" in the third section, as the piano is suddenly gone, and now the original synthy+guitar background is back. Soon enough strings enter and hint at the start of the song. The strings take a little time to graduate to 16th notes, but when they do, they are playing the original wandering theme. The plain vanilla analog synth that started the theme has been replaced by organic, human orchestration, and it's remarkable and beautiful. This song is a beautiful morning, interrupted by a rude thunderstorm, returning slowly to beams of sun until the full glory of the day is with us. |
|
| Saint Etienne – Sylvie Lyrics | 12 years ago |
|
This song has a really unusual structure for a pop song. It's the same 32 bar chord sequence repeated five times with different instrumentation: 1. solo piano, (4 bars of "intro"), 2. piano-bass-bongos 3. add vocals and strings 4. add synth 5. abruptly breaking down to just vocals, acoustic gtr, bongos and drums for the reveal of "Although you're my little sister" and abruptly back up to "full band" to return to the song Then a final half minute of "Over and over again/ Oh Sylvie girl" that feels like a chorus but isn't, followed by a half minute of just the final four bars of the 32-bar sequence. It's genius! |
|
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.