Wendell Gee

Wendell Gee was a local businessman in the Athens, Ga area.

• He was a used-car salesman, if I remember correctly. In the "Shiny Chatty People" interview, the guys say there is a little town near Athens where there are a bunch of businesses owned by people named "Gee" -- pool hall, bail bondsman, etc. "You just know it must be some kind of family," Peter says. He doesn't quite explain why they used the name in the song, though

Wendell Gee is an actual person. It's who one of the members in the band used to work for, and he actually worked for him on a farm. It's not about changing, it's about the death of a man he worked for that respected him. Wendell slipped away, who he was never able to say goodbye to or tell Wendell how much he appreciated him. Wendell Gee is a friends grandfather. It's awesome to live where someone famous is from! :D

I don't think the meaning has anything to do with the actual person Wendell Gee. For me it's a beautiful and happy song about someone who chooses not to have a normal life, but to be a dreamer and a mystic.

Also, I think the line is "whistle as the wind blows, to the lee," which is the word for the direction the wind blows.

I have no clue what this song means, but this is one of my favorite lyrics:

If the wind were colors And if the air could speak Then whistle as the wind blows Whistle as the wind blows

The string on the line of trees could easily be his clothes line and it's just kind of the opening of him in his backyard doing laundry. It appears he is an old guy who isn't your ordinary citizen. He moves the beat of his own drum, a nonconformist. As for the middle lyrics they don't sound right. But it appears he's past on and no longer is with us. People may have understood him better if they looked at things the way he did from his perspective if they took the time to get to know him.

Saturnine lyrics. Liking the tune...

I think this is just an imagined funeral for a man. People eulogize him and tell stories about him and his life, but at the end 'there wasn't even time to say goodbye'. We can 'whistle as the wind blows' but once we stop the air carries it away, forever.

Although the song was inspired by a real person, as mentioned by two of the other commenters, I find some of the lyrics to be exceedingly surreal and ill-fitting to be a reference to a physical death. In the first verse, Wendell (from the old German Vandal, a tribe name which came to mean perpetration of destruction) tugs a string which held the line of trees, implying that the trees are either no longer in line or that the string which held them has snapped. This may be a metaphor for a loss of respect (being ordered in a line, or tethered by a string) for symbols of elder strength (trees). This interpretation is also supported by the next few lines in this verse. The second verse starts with a dream of a tree (a symbol of elder strength or authority) losing its "middle" (the source or core of that strength or authority). He builds a wholly artificial core to replace the source of authority, and that core became corrupt (it "turned to lizard skin", which is the skin of a reptile, a common metaphor for a person of shifty, untrustworthy, or cold-blooded morality). Ie., a used car salesman. Climbing inside and losing Wendell Gee has the obvious interpretation of his personality being replaced or entombed in his new philosophy. The repeating background lyric of "Gonna miss you, boy" also conveys the loss of a child, not an adult, which fits with the metaphor of a child becoming an adult with thickened skin and a loss of innocent morality.

In the last verse, two tempting but empty phrases are used to prompt the listener to follow the path of Wendell and "whistle as the wind blows", which is also a common metaphor for loose morals.

I think it is a story about a guy who committed suicide by hanging himself on a clothes line. "Takes a tug upon a string that held a line of trees" "there wasn't even time to say goodbye to Wendell Gee"

When I was a little kid, I watched a show called Reading Rainbow. There was one episode that dealt with death and what it meant. To emphasize this theme, the featured book that episode was a story about an old man who died and how his friends dealt with it. There was a sequence in the book where he passed into the next life while asleep, and that's what this song reminds me of. I'm not even sure why, but that episode made me bawl when I watched it as a child, and this song sort of evokes the same feeling, a very specific sadness I can't quite put my finger on.

Sorry if that didn't make any sense.