Turn To Stone

It's 1982, and I'm playing Dungeons and Dragons over at my friend Leon's house. My character got petrified (turned to stone) by a basilisk. Although the effect got reversed, I spent a good chunk of the game unable to do anything, so it was a frustrating evening. As I got into my car to drive home at the end of the night, this song (of course!) was on the radio...

The meaning of the song is relatively straightforward. The love of his life has left him and he remains miserable hoping that she will return some day. The melody of this song is beautiful and resonates a style that is distinctively ELO. Even if you heard another band play it you would recognize it as an ELO song. The brilliance of the song is not in its simplistic meaning, it is found in the poetry of the lyrics, and the craft in which this melancholy feeling is conveyed to the listener.

He begins by explaining his emptiness and how his world has gone dim. He uses the imagery of the city streets being empty and the lights not shining any more. The sadness and lost of zest for life are, "the songs that are way down low". These thoughts keep turning and turning around in his head.

He contrasts these sad thoughts with faint memories of the good times he had with her in the past. The memories of the past, of "everything that is alive", are the "sounds that flow into his mind". These memories are faint, occurring within the background of the more intense sadness, which is why they are only "echos of the daylight". This is his current condition, the condition of being in his "blue world".

His love for her still burns like a fire, but the torment he goes through each day is worst at night and begins to fade by dawn. This subtle insight will ring true for anyone who has experience love loss. He uses this romantic phrase "the dying embers of the night" to capture this meaning.

The next line, "still glows upon the wall so bright, burning, burning". Perhaps some time has passed and yet his passion for her still glows bright. I like the usage of the word burning here. In the previous verses he used turning, turning to mean the thoughts of sadness in his mind. Here he uses burning, burping to mean the torment of the heart. So this affair affects both heart and mind and it is all consuming.

"The tired street hat hide away, from here to everywhere they go. Roll past my door into the day". In the night he goes searching for her. At every turn and corner he does not find her so the streets look the same or tired. The search is endless but finally at daybreak the search leads him back home. This may not literally be a search on the physical streets, but more likely he is constantly imagining and scheming a way to get her back.

Turn to Stone, the title and theme of the song, indicates a stone, an inanimate object, not alive. The will to live has left him and like a tone he's paralyzed to participate in living his life. On a different aspect, like a stone, he can make his heart hard, so that it is protected from being broken. His only salvation is that she returns. In a last ditch effort he doesn't give up hope and resolves that she "will return again some day." Meanwhile, he's still turning to stone.

…so many poetic ways to convey a single feeling.

Its his dog whose left at home. im not going post the lyrics, but look at them. the first 2 verses, to me, don't seem to the perspective of a human. in between the 2nd and 3rd verse is that part where it seems to be a little frantic, which reminds me of when you have a dogs ball and he's giving you that "throw me the ball,throw me the ball,huh,huh,huh,o my god,huh,huh, throw me the ball" look. and the part about the dancing shadows on the wall, the two step in the hall. i picture the shadow of dog legs moving through a hall. thats my 2 cents, great song either way

Holy shit Kenobi...that's an awesome story. I

The singer's world has lost all meaning without his lover. He's simply waiting until the day she comes back.

"you will return again someday / to my blue world"

A callback to "Shangri-La" I think.

The paralysis after the end of a long-term romantic relationship. Life has moved on but they still see themselves standing still.

As a starting point, history by now should have leaked out what these lyrics really mean, so, it's confusing that there's any need for speculation.

Nevertheless, it's fun so let's go. My approach is to first take a step back and get overview of Jeff's patterns, assuming he wrote these lyrics, something I'd love confirmation of. IMO, ELO's lyrics do not seem to especially be mind binders, discussing, e.g., "complex" topics like the weather and chicks. Rather, ELO's secret sauce is their polyphonic ear candy added in later on. That in mind, we can eliminate lyric interpretations that require anything resembling mental gymnastics and focus on very simple ideas.

"The city streets are empty now"

This probably indicates that the bars have closed. The dancing is over. The city and people are officially sleeping. It indirectly references that beforehand the singer was "on fire" earlier, entertaining at least one person and having a blast. This theory is supported by the later lyrics.

"Yes I'm turnin' to stone 'Cos you ain't coming home,"

Ok, now we see he was with a chick. She's gone home. And, now he has nothing to do but stare at the walls, remembering she shadows he could see while dancing. She had given him something to be animated about. Perhaps conversation too, but he was impressing her, feeling great about himself. Now, at 3am, there's no one to impress. No one to talk with. Nobody there to see how amazing he can be.

So, the singer has turned to stone, in a sense. He's not dancing anymore (turned to stone is the opposite of dancing). And, he has got nothing to say or do since there's nobody there to hear or see it, at least that he cares about enough to bother "being on" in a Robin Williams sense of how on fire he was.

The word, blue, in the last line references Mr. Blue Sky (song about nice weather vs. cloudy), and signifies when Jeff is on fire in the crowd singing or dancing with his beautiful date, or otherwise feeling great and not alone but surrounded by wonderful friends and an audience so large and incomprehensible that only a few other humans besides Jeff have ever experienced.

[Edit: added an introduction]

ooooo k lol

haha, Kenobi. Nice tie-in with the song, didn't see it at first. This should be the theme song for D&D players who get petrified. They play it whenever they get petrified and pester the other players by playing it over and over again.