Past-Due

This whole album is about an amazing story, of loss and reconstruction and moving on. It's the events as they occur in life, with death in the background. Hospital Vespers, Past Due and Manifest are about the same person, someone who is dying, or in the process of fighting a disease, who is very dear to the speaker. Obviously, that person dies (Past Due) but the CD begins with a tone of hope, saying "I'm permitted one act I can save, I choose to sit here next to you and wave." By the time "Hospital Vespers" rolls around, the person who we have been sitting next to is slowly decaying, and desperately needs to feel the privacy of spirituality. So we (the singer, the voice of the song) come visit this person in a hospital and turn off the ever-watching nurse's camera, so that they can have one last private moment. It's so heart-wrenching I have cried listening to it. I've cried because the story really reminds me of my only brother, dying of cancer. How we supported him, saw him decay and then finally with the funeral and the obituaries.

John Samsom is an amazing songwriter and much underapreciated.

I wanted to add this song because i was so suprised no one else had added it. Its a great song and when i listen to it i think of how i need to live every day like its my last. I might not get to finish things i need too...

ya dude this song is so GR8...makes me sad, its just the music is so soft and lyk really i guess i could say powerful. just kinda gets ya right there ya know?? w/e....weakerthans rock.....ExCxFxU!

i never thought i liked emo until i heard this song....so awesome...genius lyrically

ok...not really emo...i made that comment a long time ago...i'm a diehard Wt fan now. still love this song.

anyways this is the last movement of the three-part suite in Reconstruction Site. basically, this is the part where she's finally died after wasting time in (Manifest) and being admitted to the hospital in (Hospital Vespers). such a sad song, but ingenius how Weakerthans make it the last movement of a tragedy that begins earlier in the album.

"Passed away to wonder what theyre holding In those hands were never shown the places Formal photographs refuse to mention His tiny feet That birthmark on her knee The tyranny of framing our attention With all the eyes their eyes no longer see"

BEAUTIFUL. And it's true...

LITERALLY: Formal studio photograph might make a person look pretty and everything, but it doesn't show them as they truly are like a friends out-of-focus banged-up snapshot might. Formal photographs just catch a practiced smile. Snapshots show a moment of true emotion in your life.

and FIGURATIVELY: Alot of times, if we only look at someone's "formal face", we assume alot of things. Let's say I take a look at some popular girl. She's got makeup, a pretty smile, and smart fashion. Great. So she must be happy, right? Not nessecarily. I don't really KNOW her; I don't see her "snapshot" face. For all I know she could be depressed and suicidal. But because all I can see is her "formal" face, the one she puts on for the public in the morning, I don't know what she might be like behind closed doors.

Figuratively or literally, it applies to anyone.

This song has extra meaning for me because 3 years ago in Febuary 7 kids died at my school "February always finds you folding local papers open to the faces passed away to wonder what theyre holding" i miss you guys

obituaries and obituary photographs.

this song is kind of broken up weird as far as the vocal phrasing. The ends of phrases are really beginnings of new sentences. (i like it.) If it were and essay, it would look more like this:

"February always finds you folding local papers open to the faces passed away to wonder what they're holding in those hands. Were never shown the places formal photographs refuse to mention: his tiny feet ,that birthmark on her knee. The tyranny of framing our attention with all the eyes their eyes no longer see."

etc.

I always thought the pictures in the obituaries were a little bit off. It's always just a head-shot, and that little photograph and paragraph written about who lived longer and who didn't and where to go see the dead body doesn't do justice to the beauty and complexity of every human life.

But, it really can't be debated how unbelievably poignant the last lyrics are :

"Give what you can to keep to comfort this plain fear you can't exstinguish or dismiss."

has anyone noted yet that this is in the form of an Elizabethan sonnet?