In regards to the meaning of this song:
Before a live performance on the EP Five Stories Falling, Geoff states “It’s about the last time I went to visit my grandmother in Columbus, and I saw that she was dying and it was the last time I was going to see her. It is about realizing how young you are, but how quickly you can go.”
That’s the thing about Geoff and his sublime poetry, you think it’s about one thing, but really it’s about something entirely different. But the lyrics are still universal and omnipresent, ubiquitous, even. So relatable. That’s one thing I love about this band. I also love their live performances, raw energy and Geoff’s beautiful, imperfectly perfect vocals. His voice soothes my aching soul.
In Liverpool
On Sunday
No traffic
On the avenue
The light is pale and thin
Like you
No sound, down
In this part of town
Except for the boy in the belfry
He's crazy, he's throwing himself
Down from the top of the tower
Like a hunchback in heaven
He's ringing the bells in the church
For the last half an hour
He sounds like he's missing something
Or someone that he knows he can't
Have now and if he isn't
I certainly am
Homesick for a clock
That told the same time
Sometimes you made no sense to me
If you lie on the ground
In somebody's arms
You'll probably swallow some of their history
And the boy in the belfry
He's crazy, he's throwing himself
Down from the top of the tower
Like a hunchback in heaven
He's ringing the bells in the church
For the last half an hour
He sounds like he's missing something
Or someone that he knows he can't
Have now and if he isn't
I certainly am
I'll be the girl who sings for my supper
You'll be the monk whose forehead is high
He'll be the man who's already working
Spreading a memory all through the sky
In Liverpool
On Sunday
No reason to even remember you now
Except for the boy in the belfry
He's crazy, he's throwing himself
Down from the top of the tower
Like a hunchback in heaven
He's ringing the bells in the church
For the last half an hour
He sounds like he's missing something
Or someone that he knows he can't
Have now and if he isn't
I certainly am
In Liverpool
In Liverpool
On Sunday
No traffic
On the avenue
The light is pale and thin
Like you
No sound, down
In this part of town
Except for the boy in the belfry
He's crazy, he's throwing himself
Down from the top of the tower
Like a hunchback in heaven
He's ringing the bells in the church
For the last half an hour
He sounds like he's missing something
Or someone that he knows he can't
Have now and if he isn't
I certainly am
Homesick for a clock
That told the same time
Sometimes you made no sense to me
If you lie on the ground
In somebody's arms
You'll probably swallow some of their history
And the boy in the belfry
He's crazy, he's throwing himself
Down from the top of the tower
Like a hunchback in heaven
He's ringing the bells in the church
For the last half an hour
He sounds like he's missing something
Or someone that he knows he can't
Have now and if he isn't
I certainly am
I'll be the girl who sings for my supper
You'll be the monk whose forehead is high
He'll be the man who's already working
Spreading a memory all through the sky
In Liverpool
On Sunday
No reason to even remember you now
Except for the boy in the belfry
He's crazy, he's throwing himself
Down from the top of the tower
Like a hunchback in heaven
He's ringing the bells in the church
For the last half an hour
He sounds like he's missing something
Or someone that he knows he can't
Have now and if he isn't
I certainly am
In Liverpool
In Liverpool
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It's about a guy who has somehow lost a loved one. She meant to much to him to the extent that he can't seem to go on with life without her. He's even raedy to kill hiimself to avoid having to endure the pain of her loss all by himself. The hunchback is used as a simile to describe the situation this young man has found himself in: lonely, and incapable of loving someone else. He is yearning for her, and wishes things could go back to the way they were...
this is about a guy suzanne met when she was about 18 in liverpool! she was teaching guitar at some camp and fell inlove with a guy from liverpool. this is about how she misses him! gypsy is about him too!
this is a follow up to gypsy. it is about the man she met in america going home to liverpool! she will never see him again. it is ripping out her heart and she hopes he misses her too.
@seventyx7 I saw Suzanne Vega in concert last night and she told the story about this song. This is pretty much right. It is a sequel to Gypsy, which was about a boy from Liverpool who she knew when both were working at different summer camps in the Adirondacks, in the U.S. They met at a bar where counselors would go at night and she had a relationship with him - for 6 weeks, as she said. She wrote Gypsy immediately following and this some years later, when she was in Liverpool, thinking about him. She was also reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame at the time (or had just read it) - hence that bit. She told a funny story about how they connected later - the guy's girlfriend couldn't believe he had once dated Suzanne Vega - and how they now still stay in touch, as friends. She played Gypsy then this, back to back. Good stuff.
Like alot of her songs, this about an unsucessful relationship. "I'll be the girl who sings for my supper You'll be the monk whose forehead is high" . . . Does anyone know what this means? It has confused me for awhile.
@IckleRu The imagery is from "Hunchback of Notre Dame" by Victor Hugo. The girl who sings for her supper is Esmerelda, the gypsy girl that Quasimodo loves (and can never have, even though he saves her life) and the monk with the high forehead is the evil priest.
sing for my supper/forehead is high...
((paying verbal tribute in order for him to return her affections (worship) while he enjoys being the pious lover.))
This song reminds me of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Sorry, the hunchback and belfry referances were just too much.
i think she really wants to think that this lover is thinking about her the way she thinks about him.. so she's telling to herself that he looks like someone who misses somebody.. well if he doesn't and I'm just fooling myself... i'd still love him...
I'm surprised no one's zoomed in on what "And if he isn't, I certainly am" could mean. She could have made the story up about the boy in the belfry. He could be ringing the bell perfectly normally and she's reading into it. Or, maybe she can't even see the tower and has just made up a story about what's happening because the bells sound so frenetic to her, because of her mental state.
So much hinges on that line....
Wow - I never interpretted this song as a failed relationship. I always thought it was a social commentary in regards to the influx on gun crime occuring in the Liverpool area at the time she wrote it in (92). Due to gang related crime and shootings there were in the area that people wouldnt venture into. And the fear instilled in everday people on the surround areas
This song really speaks to me, and always has. I have dissociative tendencies, having only recently remembered trauma from 30+ years ago. To me, the boy in the belfry is the part of the psyche that holds the trauma until it's safe enough to feel it and grow past it. The bells are a signal from the unconscious that life isn't okay the way it is: the horrors of the past must eventually be reckoned with. The longings and homesickness are a side effect of this type of coping mechanism: some good things have to be banished along with the bad, to be remembered only when it's safe to remember everything.